


Disorderly Conduct

by thrillhaus



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, Misuse of the Force, Phasma shows up, Unintended exhibitionism, also a special guest courtesy of the Force!, first order is the workplace from hell, guess what hux has em too, neither of them are particularly nice people, she's having a midlife crisis, tacky fascist sex fantasies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-03-20 21:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13725975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thrillhaus/pseuds/thrillhaus
Summary: It's hard being Supreme Leader. Kylo Ren may be the most powerful person in the galaxy, but he still doesn't have a girlfriend. And he still has enemies. Including among his generals. One general in particular.With a little bit of advice, Kylo sets out to fix at least one of these problems through an unconventional and particularly nasty method. It works... but Kylo forgot one thing.Don't leave your enemies alive...





	1. Chapter 1

“Good morning!”

Kylo Ren pushes himself up from the black mat where he’s been kneeling for hours in the deepest meditation. He stares at the cheerful little beverage droid that’s entered his chambers. Morning? Night? Those terms are irrelevant to a creature like him, Supreme Leader of the First Order, quite possibly one the most powerful dark lords to ever exist. 

_ One of the most powerful dark lords to ever wear a ridiculous custommade sparkling golden Supreme Leader cape. Who still hasn’t managed to find one untrained desert girl. _

He resists the urge to hack the chirping droid in two as it lists its offerings--tea, leema juice, blue milk. His fingers are actually twitching, but he can’t be like this anymore, he has to save his anger for his higher tasks. If he wastes his time randomly cutting up every object and idiot that gets in his way, he won’t have the honed anger he needs for his tracking of the Resistance, his most urgent task. 

Oh, fuck it. He requests a tea, downs it in one gulp, then throws the metal cup at the droid’s retreating back. It gives a dainty yelp as it skitters away.

Control is difficult. Leadership is  _ difficult. _

He’s spent so much time tracking Rey through the Force and the Resistance through Rey. He can still sense her--she’s heading in the direction of Parassa, the famous planet of thirty moons--but the elaborate visions have stopped. Either had more to do with the bond than he knew, or she’s powerful enough to shut him out almost completely. There’s nothing left of her but a bright aura, like starlight moving through a cloud. Beautiful, but fucking unsatisfying. Even in the deepest meditation--and lately he’s  _ always _ in the deepest meditation--he can’t touch her. He hates this, would almost rather not know where she is than be cut off from her body like this.

What’s equally frustrating is that if he lets his concentration slip even the tiniest bit while he’s meditating, he’s surrounded by other presences, rushing around him and blocking his sense of Rey. Some of these presences are stronger than others, almost sentient. However, most of them ignore him, just as Rey must be ignoring him. 

But lately  _ someone _ has been approaching him during these meditation sessions. At least  thinks it’s a someone--it could be a being other than human, or other than… anything. When it had first happened, had half pissed himself.  _ It’s Luke _ . Then he had hoped it was his grandfather, come to speak to him at last.

_ Help me _ , he thought.  _ Teach me your power. _

You? You have the power.  _ Unlimited  _ power. You need no help. You need peace of mind. Let me give it to you.

Kylo had been impressed by that line, even if it’s not really that true about the power. He doesn’t have the girl. He hasn’t avenged his humiliation on Crait. But he does need peace, and to talk to someone who isn’t family.

And whatever this presence is, it’s sympathetic. Endlessly willing to listen, free with its advice. Not distracted or mocking or cruel. This is what a father is supposed to be like, Kylo thinks.

He communes with the presence sometimes, leaving off from his pursuit. He tells the presence about the powerful girl who denied him, who chose to return to dirt and dust rather than be at his side. Kylo feels the presence’s kindly chuckle through the Force. It says that their separation is a temporary state of affairs, that they’re meant to be together, that Rey is meant to be his  _ Queen _ . 

Kylo hadn’t thought of Rey as his queen before, but he’s intrigued by the idea, although sometimes after he speaks with the presence he feels like the remains of someone else’s sex fantasy have ended up lodged in his head. He stops dreaming about Rey stripping off her arm wraps and starts dreaming of her wearing elaborate red dresses and white makeup, which makes her look like a corpse. It’s nothing like the girl he’s seen and touched and fought with. 

Maybe this is what a queen looks like, he wouldn’t know. After all, the sainted  _ Leia Organa  _ was only a  _ princess _ .

Kylo Ren has more than just girl problems, though. 

Back when he was more into masks, Kylo used to sit in front of Darth Vader’s helmet and ask it questions. One of those questions was why the man never seized the title of greatest power for himself.  _ Why didn’t you rule in our name, grandfather? Why didn’t you end the  _ lie _ that is this universe?  _

Now Kylo has managed to figure that answer out all by himself. All it took was attending Snoke’s funeral.

Personally, Kylo would have been satisfied to leave whatever was left of Snoke floating out in the middle of space. But no, there had to be a supreme funeral for the ex-Supreme Leader. He had had to sit on a platform in front of everyone wearing his golden Supreme Leader cape. Hux had showed up, all healed up from Crait, parading his troops up and down in what was presumably a show of devotion to the new leader. It had been dull. Pathetic. Like a kid showing off his collection of toy soldiers. Hux had even given a closing speech, all about loyalty and the soldier’s duty to eliminate threats to order. Kylo had drifted off until Hux finally tired of his own voice and finished the production off with that blaster salute.

That was when Kylo noticed how Hux had positioned the troopers. All of those blasters were conveniently aimed in his direction. 

Nice display. So that’s why grandfather didn’t bother. It turns out that when you’re at the top, you become the target of every idiot below. 

Kylo isn’t  _ personally _ scared of Hux. He could beat him in a fight a million times out of a million. But he gets Hux’s message. If anything particularly nasty--asphyxiation, decapitation, a quick trip out an airlock--happens to Hux, Kylo can expect Hux’s loyal soldiers to avenge their martyred master. Maybe Hux is planning to sic all those troopers on him. Maybe? Probably.  _ Certainly.  _ Stormtroopers are legendarily bad shots, but Kylo doesn’t like his chances against literally thousands of them. 

How could have been Snoke easier to kill than Hux? It’s ridiculous. 

He communes with his presence about this dilemma, too. The presence tells him that violence does not always have to be done with one’s own hands, that one can draw out the violence and desire from within one’s opponent so that he destroys himself. 

This would be helpful, except that is Hux murderously violent already and he hasn’t destroyed himself yet. Kylo wonders if the presence is lying to him, just like Luke and Snoke and everyone else who blathered on about light and darkness. He was hoping that the presence would just tell him what to do, but everything has to be in the form of a mysterious riddle. 

And now that he’s leader, Kylo doesn’t have time to solve riddles. His stalemate with Hux has led to practical complications. Hux said that going toward Parassa was idiotic. He hadn’t used that exact word, of course, but instead he had talked about resources and tactical terrain and the weight of fucking fuel. According to Hux, and he had covered this in  _ immense _ detail, the Resistance would be going to the Bellor system, since that system had the resources and cover that they would need. It’s the exact opposite direction of where Kylo knows they have to go.

Technically, the Supreme Leader’s orders come first, but technically, Kylo doesn’t trust Hux further than he can throw him without the aid of the Force. He has to meditate--has to keep his connection with Rey--but while he’s doing that, sometimes he loses track of the ship itself actually  _ is _ . And it doesn’t  _ seem _ like he’s getting any closer to Rey right now. She could be playing a trick on him, but it would be  _ much _ more humiliating if he was being tricked by Hux.

So. He visits the bridge to try and make sure of things. It’s not something he wants to do at all, it’s just another one of the burdens of leadership. Kylo dislikes the bridge. He would have disliked it anyway--it’s so full of lives--but it’s also inescapably Hux’s territory. 

Today is the day for one of those dreaded missions. Kylo’s stomach twists in knots as Hux gives his assurances that is everything is orderly and efficient. Hux is neat as a figurine, as always. Kylo could knock him over right now and he’d get up with hardly a hair out of place. Kylo is aware that he’s still wearing the gold cape, and that he hasn’t really taken it off since Snoke’s funeral. It’s stained and there are a few lightsaber slashes in it now. 

“I want to see the plans for Parassa.” Kylo doesn’t actually want to see the plans, he doesn’t really understand the plans, but he has to justify his presence here somehow. 

“Whatever you want, Supreme Leader.” Hux smiles, like it’s funny that Kylo is weak enough to  _ want _ things.  _ Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you _ , Kylo thinks, and he suddenly envies Hux, who must have no desires outside of running drills and blowing things up. He’s certainly not wishing he was somewhere else so he could jack off to a fantasy about standing by a lakeshore with a woman wearing a lace dress that looks like a giant doily. 

_ What the fuck is wrong with me now?  _ Envying Hux. Wonderful, he’s managed to reach an even deeper crater of worthlessness in his life.

“Can you see the map well enough, Supreme Leader? Once we reach the fifth moon, we’ll consolidate our power here…”

_ Our power. _ Since when was it shared? There’s one leader here. It’s in the damn title.

_ There has to be a way to get rid of you neatly.  _ He imagines cutting in Hux half, right through his shiny belt buckle. In reality, a perfectly whole Hux has turned his attention to his officers. A particularly lumpish one has slumped over his console, chin in hand. 

Hux positions himself directly behind the offender. 

“What is this behavior?”

The officer jerks awake. “General! Supreme Leader!” Officer Sleepy’s hands fly to his throat. Hux gives him a look of anticipation, like he’s just waiting for some magic to happen.

They think that Kylo Ren is a mad sorcerer. Well, they’re out of luck if they think he’s going to put on a show today. Especially on Hux’s behalf. Kylo hasn’t mastered the secrets of the galaxy to waste them on some screenbound lackey.

Hux curls his lip. Kylo thinks that this must be the signal for “move on,” but then Hux starts barking out orders.

“Lieutenant Demia! Punish this man for slacking at his duty!”

A young woman springs up and struts over to the offender. She draws back her hand and slaps the man full in the face. The man flinches.

“I’m sorry, Supreme Leader--”

“Again!”

This time, the woman uses her left hand. 

“And I apologize to you, too, General!”

“That’s enough. Lieutenant Demia, stand down.”

Officer Lumpy bows his head, rubbing his jowls with his hands, then slowly turns back to his console, poking at a red blob of data with a trembling finger. The slapper gives an impossibly crisp salute, then blends back into the background of the bridge.

What was that? Was it some sort of old Imperial ritual? Kylo doesn’t want to lose face by asking, so he reaches out to sense the feelings of the all the busy drones surrounding him. These officers fear him, of course, but they actually distrust Hux, too. It’s not burning hatred, but it’s not the slavish adoration he’d imagined the troops had felt during that endless ceremony. Little doubts pop up like sparks from a fire. Why is Hux never there at the bridge when things go wrong? Kylo catches a thought about a comm call that made look Hux look an utter fool. And he can sense that most of the officers are a bit confused about what just went on, just like he is. It obviously isn’t part of normal protocol.

Kylo  _ is _ capable of sympathy, as long as it isn’t for his particular victims. He looks back at the punished officer and feels vaguely sad and tired, the same feeling he sometimes gets after breaking something, like a console or a countertop. Why is he surrounded by such petty men? 

To cheer himself up, he focuses on the pettiest specimen of humanity available in the galaxy.  He doesn’t attempt this as often as he should, because he can usually tell what Hux is feeling--angry or smug--just by looking at him. Besides, when he tries to get inside Hux’s mind, he hits a wall of practiced thought--ship formations, lists of armaments, the index to some manual on grand strategy. That fucker Snoke must have taught him some sort of thought shielding.

However, Snoke is dead and Hux must have forgotten to practice. Right now his mind is completely unguarded.

Kylo expects to find a gory vision of his head on the end of a Imperial dress sword. To his surprise, though, Hux isn’t thinking about him, or about much of anything at all. He just feels comforted, as if he’s wrapped himself in a blanket in a cold room. He’s also aroused.

Kylo pulls back to physically observe. A quick bite of the lip, a flushed cheek--Hux almost looks fully alive. He may not fully realize it himself, but he’s more than a little into playing with his toy soldiers. 

It should have been obvious. All these First Order types must be into gratification games and power plays. They’re disconnected beings. It’s what gets them through days spent with only five dull senses.

“Are you listening? When we arrive at Parassa...” 

Hux is talking again. He hasn’t even noticed that Kylo has been looking into his mind. He also isn’t using Kylo’s title. It doesn’t even matter, though, because Kylo is having a revelation. Two revelations, in fact.

First: Hux, the grand strategist, the master disciplinarian, does have desires. He won’t admit to them, though, and that means he can’t guard against them. 

Second: Hux in and of himself is nothing. Any dead-eyed human can scream orders and brainwash soldiers. There are probably hundreds of people with those exact qualities on this bridge alone. It’s what he represents right now that’s important--precision, stability, possibly some military traditions that Kylo never gave a damn about before and isn’t going to start learning about now. Order. 

If he can strip Hux of those qualities, then Hux is finished. 

And Hux has just shown him a way to do it. All he has to do is wait until Hux pulls this act again and play to his natural instincts. Manipulate him, just like Kylo’s special presence told him to do. Make Hux go where he already wants to go. To the insensitive observer, nobody will know that Kylo was even involved. He’ll come out of this with perfectly clean hands.

Hux’s hands, however, are about to get very messy indeed.

Kylo feels surprisingly calm as Hux escorts him to the end of the bridge. He watches as Hux trots back to his men, just so he can list all the wonderfully superficial things he won’t miss about him. His tick-tock walk, his pasty face, his stupid slicked-back hair. It helps him concentrate on what he’s about to do next. 

Reaches out with the and gives a little flick to the general’s mouth. If it had been meant nicely, it might even have been like a very light kiss.

Hux startles. Kylo almost expects it not to work, for Hux to turn around and catch him out, but instead the general just runs his thumb across his lips. He’s a bit thrown, Kylo senses. Maybe he’s tasting a little of the misery that Kylo experiences when he thinks about Rey.

The thought of making somebody else miserable and that somebody being Hux is the first good thing that’s happened to Kylo Ren since he’s become the king of the known universe. He can’t  _ wait  _ to put this plan into action. It’s going to be amazing. 

_ Goodbye, General. _

  



	2. Chapter 2

_ What a lovely morning. _

Technically, it’s never morning on the Finalizer. Time exists in a set round of cycles. General Armitage Hux knows this well enough, but he allows himself this little fancy.  _ When I wake, morning begins, and when I rest, night falls. _ It makes for a long day, but Hux isn’t one to shirk his duties.

It’s two hours into this particular morning, and everything is where it is supposed to be, for once. Hux is in his right place, in command, overseeing his bridge. 

_ My bridge. My crew. My fleet.  _

Hux feels better than he has in weeks. He’s recovered his physical health--no more Force-induced bruises, no more aches--and with it, he feels, his confidence. There had been a dreadful few days after Crait, where he had spent every waking hour salvaging the Supremacy while simultaneously attempting a furtive study of arcane defenses. It had been embarrassing even asking a droid for materials on something so foolish, but his situation with Ren had truly seemed dire. He can admit that it had been a particularly trying time.

(Here’s a personal detail about that trying time that the general is strenuously trying to repress: as a child, Hux was a habitual bedwetter. He outgrew it, with some rough encouragement, long ago, but two nights after leaving the salt planet he flooded his sheets. He hid what evidence he could, then spent the remainder of the time scheduled for rest sitting bolt upright in a chair. He still doesn’t trust himself while he sleeps, and wakes up every so often to check that the towel he’s put down the front of his shorts is still dry.)

_ Fortunately _ , when faced with the pressures of leadership,  _ some people  _ are able to rise to the challenge. Meanwhile, Ren has simply crumbled. According to the ship’s cameras and the men that Hux sends out to tail Ren’s movements, Ren spends most of his time either sitting cross-legged on the floor or sleeping. Sometimes he eats or practices with his laser sword, but he hasn’t seemed particularly interested in asserting his authority. Ren practically had to be dragged out of his chambers to attend the Supreme Leader’s--no, Snoke’s--funeral ceremony. Hux had planned most of it, including the grand gesture at the end. He smiles to himself, remembering the look on Ren‘s face. It had had the intended effect--afterwards, Ren had spent even more time closeted away.

Well, the more time Ren spends doing his mystic exercises, the better. He hasn’t visited the bridge for days, and he was acting oddly the last time he deigned to make his presence known. Childish, really. Maybe it’s an advanced stage of Force-induced dementia.

A hacking cough interrupts this moment of calm. Hux teps back a bit from his officers. Some sort of virus is going around the bridge, and Hux doesn’t intend to fall victim to it, however short his stay in medbay might be.

He  _ has _ noticed a fall in morale. This illness. Slips in behavior, a lack of enthusiasm for the given task. Multiple stormtroopers have ended up in reconditioning.

It’s almost understandable. He knows there have been been certain military setbacks lately. He absolutely will not dwell on them any longer except insofar as they can be used as lessons learned for future actions. 

There also have been multiple unfortunate changes in the chain of command. Ren has been a surprisingly mild disaster so far, but several friendly officers have been lost in the past few weeks. And Phasma is lost, too--not dead, but mangled beyond recognition, her once-formidable physical strength probably gone forever. Hux doesn’t exactly feel sad about it--it seems to be her fate to meet various pitfalls, perhaps she wasn’t as impressive a fighter as she made herself out to be--but they were allies, as far as he knew.

And now this wild chase. Anyone with a smattering of strategic knowledge would realize that the Resistance would be heading away from Parassa, not toward it, but Ren claims they went in that direction. What is his evidence? He has a psychic bond with the infamous space witch of Starkiller base, the same one who killed Snoke. Hux doesn’t believe that for a second, but his own display of grief over Snoke’s death has trapped him in this shared story. He can’t very well turn around and say it was Ren. At least, not yet. 

_ You’ve missed your chances. You won’t get them back, boy. _

No, that’s wrong.  _ Completely _ wrong. There’s plenty of time. Everyone still trusts and obeys the sagacious leadership of Armitage Hux. 

One of the officers is speaking unnaturally low, and Hux looks over just in time to see a slip of colored paper pass between two hands. Contraband stims. At this level. 

Hux focuses on the recipient, who is still clutching the paper. 

“What do you have in your hand?”

“Sir! I--”

Hux doesn’t want to hear an explanation. He notes that Lieutenant Demia--her! Of all his subordinates--is sitting next to the offender. 

Everything is falling apart again. 

Hux resists the urge to scream or yell or to cover his face with his hands. He comforts himself with the prospect of the ritual to come. Hux has observed his underlings’ reactions to it and has occasionally wondered if these methods of discipline are archaic or even counterproductive. However, sometimes the old methods are the best. Besides, whenever he practices these methods he finds himself better able to moderate any aberrations in mood afterwards. Hux prides himself on his ability to present a model of control to his troops at all times and in  _ any _ circumstances.

“Lieutenant Demia!” 

Demia springs up. She knows what’s coming next. Technically he should punish her first, but he observes the lieutenant who was passing the stims. Tall, pale, with a shock of dark hair that’s a bit past regulation length. He looks a little sulky at being caught, too. Hux can’t help but wonder what a nice handprint would look like across that face. 

He signals Demia.

Demia draws back and hits the lieutenant--Aouriel, that’s his ridiculous name--twice. Once on the left cheek, once on the right. 

This  _ should  _ be the point at which a subordinate collects the contraband and takes the offenders away for further punishment. But Hux feels strangely dissatisfied with the results. “Again!”

Demia obeys. 

“Keep going!” 

He can’t resist moving his fingers ever so slightly against the front of his tunic, and he feels himself stiffen against his own touch. 

This is a normal enough physiological reaction. It sometimes happens during these occasions, although he never  _ does _ anything with it. Hux can control himself so that he gives himself relief later, when he’s taking his evening shower. This removes any evidence and leaves him clean and relaxed for the night to come. If such habits were a proper conversation topic, he would freely admit to his own ingenuity--through his own willpower he has managed to turn what is in most creatures a weakness into a scheduled mild sedative, almost guaranteed to help him achieve his goal of a dreamless and refreshing sleep. His routine never would have worked without his privacy and a ready supply of water, but then those are the privileges of power.

However, this reaction is quickly developing into something entirely out of the usual. He feels uncommonly sensitive. He’s let Demia go on for quite a while, really, but he can’t help but indulge himself this tiny bit. Hux permits himself one heavy breath--he’ll use it to call Demia off, he promises himself--and is suddenly struck with a completely unfamiliar feeling that makes him outright gasp. 

“Harder!”

With every slap, the feeling intensifies. It’s as if something is arousing his lips and hands and oh, the parts of him that are covered to the world as well. He wouldn’t give up this ritual now for the planet and stars.

(Here’s another personal detail about the general: Hux doesn’t quite understand touching another person for nondisciplinary reasons and distrusts the motives of anyone who would attempt to do so to him. Therefore, on the occasions when he does command a partner, he keeps everything strictly mechanical. Hux doesn’t have the words for it, but he’s experiencing something akin to a first--well, maybe a second--kiss.)

A welt is forming on Aouriel’s cheek. It’s beautiful. The feeling blossoms again, this time all over and to his shock and delight,  _ inside _ him as well. He stifles a moan against the palm of his glove.

He attempts to order Demia one last time but he can hardly focus on her obedience, just on the flash of her hand as it comes down against the pale lieutenant’s face and the smack of flesh against flesh. Hux can see the anger in Aouriel’s dark brown eyes. He doesn’t like it and Hux doesn’t care.

_ That’s right, hate me all you want. I’ll have you, I’ll string you up and have you whipped, I despise you, you’re nothing to me.  _

With every hateful thought the feeling grows stronger, until he finds himself fumbling underneath his tunic for the fasteners on his fly. He’s going to touch himself, and he’s going to release, and it’s going to be glorious.

Hux has a little fantasy that he sometimes uses to aid himself in the evenings. He usually doesn’t have the mental energy to make it especially detailed, but now it comes to him, wonderfully vivid. Hux is standing atop a high, stepped pyramid, which is draped in scarlet cloth. The purifying wind plays against his face, and a swan and and an eagle arc their way through the cloudless sky. Far below Hux lies a raised path, along which stands each and every one of his troops, erect and proud. At the very end of the path slumps a particularly greasy Kylo Ren, tied up to one of those punishment posts they used to use at the academy. 

A distant horn sounds and Hux descends the stairs, one by one by one, and walks among his soldiers. He comes to the end of the stony path.

“I’m sorry,” Ren whimpers. “I’m sorry.”

He’s not sorry enough. Hux kicks him in the belly, right underneath one perfectly placed knot, and presses his blaster to Ren’s forehead.  _ Time to meet your destiny. _

He pulls the trigger and-- _ click _ .

The feeling overflows and he’s never experienced anything like this before, no, never, it just goes on and on until he can hardly even think, just shudder and sigh. A tiny part of him is still observant and he congratulates himself, as he does every time he ever comes, on his lack of audible cries.  _ Clever Armitage. You know how to take your private pleasures.  _

It feels as if his legs have turned into rags. He could just collapse and sleep forever. Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Something beeps. Wait. That’s not supposed to go off here. suddenly comes back to his senses. The catch in his own breath, the familiar scent of the filtered air of the bridge, mixed with certain smells--oh, no--the wetness and the feeling of his own intimate skin against his glove.

_ Oh. Oh, what have I done.  _

He opens his eyes. Aouriel is staring at him. Demia wears an unfamiliar expression on her familiar face. He doesn’t recognize it until he sees how she’s positioned in Aouriel’s arms--she’s unconscious. Dead, probably, judging by the hole he notices above her right eyebrow. 

He’s holding his blaster in his other hand. 

Had he fired it? He must have. ( _ You’re a terrible shot.  _ The instructors in the academy had been right, he must have meant to shoot at Aouriel. He had always admired the symmetry of Lieutenant Demia’s face.) 

Knows that the first rule is self-control. If you can’t command yourself, you’re not worthy to command others. He had vowed never to break it, not like to be like his father, and now look what’s happened. He’s a spectacle of incontinence. 

_ I’ve betrayed myself. _

He focuses on the wall ahead of him. “I…” He repeats it several times. There hardly seems to be a word left to say. 

It’s habit that takes over in these situations. 

“Stand down, Demia.”

The silence breaks with a screeched expletive. Suddenly there’s shouting, and he’s fighting off Aouriel, who is raining blows onto him. Somebody pulls Aouriel off him, and somebody else is barking out orders. Hux attempts to override the orders, then to repeat them, but It’s too much for him right now, he had had a  _ nightmare _ about this sort of insubordination after Crait, if he could only get to his chambers and be safe--

The doors rush open. For a fraction of a second, it’s a miracle, as if his ship can respond to his very thoughts. Then Hux sees who’s stepping through the door and it’s as if he’s been turned into lead.

(Here’s the last personal detail you need to know about the general: He uses stims himself. Lots of them, all perfectly prescribed.  _ Nobody _ can really survive on only three hours of sleep per night. Unfortunately for Hux, nobody can be properly stimmed forever, either. The comedowns, especially when you mix types, can be unpredictable--especially under stress. Hux is physically lucky that what’s about to happen is all that’s about to happen.)

The last thing that sees through his rapidly dimming field of vision is a black figure with a white face and a terrible flash of gold.  _ Oh, the Supreme Leader. But which one _ ? he wonders, before everything finally goes dark.


	3. Chapter 3

Kylo can feel that his plan was a success before he sees it. The bridge is awash with revulsion and confusion, and for once it’s not directed at him at all. The crew is busy breaking up a fight on the bridge. Hux isn’t part of it; he sees the majesty of the Supreme Leader and actually staggers backwards, no push needed, right into the arms of an older officer who is standing slightly outside the fray.

“What’s happened here?” Kylo has to remember to act surprised about all this. The presence has told him that keeping a straight face is very important.

“I’m so very sorry to summon you like this, Supreme Leader.” The officer is holding up the now-unconscious Hux like she’s holding a particularly large bag of trash. “There’s been an incident here. The general had some sort of mental attack, and there’s been an assault on several superior officers.”

_ Superior officers?  _ Oh, the assailant must be the dark-haired soldier who’s screaming and being restrained against a console. Hux’s eyelids flutter a little. He looks like absolute shit and Kylo wants to give himself a moment to savor it, but the officer breaks in. “Permission to restrain, sir?”

Kylo nods. He wants to see this, Hux cuffed up and dragged off for being an insane little pervert, but another one of these soldiers takes him aside.

“There are casualties, sir.”

“Casualties?” 

The officer starts explaining what happened, how Hux went in on his lieutenants, started performing certain acts, then fired his weapon at an officer. There’s a woman laid out by a console, with one of the medics crouching over her. It’s Hux’s usual slapper. The medics will be useless on that one.

He hadn’t realized that Hux went that far. He  _ had _ been in Hux’s mind far enough to see his silly little fantasy. In fact, he had even put some details in for Hux to get him really going--the wind, the horns, all the stuff that would seem exotic to someone who spent most of their life cooped up on a ship. It had been sort of fun, knowing someone and trying to please them, even if it was just to fuck them over in the end. Maybe it was  _ more _ fun if you were fucking with them. The presence had told him that.

But then he had gotten disgusted with seeing himself on a post, begging and pleading for his life. Knowing Hux, that could have gone on forever.  _ Oh, just pull the trigger on me already _ , he had thought, and Hux had done it. Kylo had--well, he had made the fantasy Kylo wink at Hux just before it happened. Dream Grand High Marshall Supreme Leader Hux hadn’t noticed, and hopefully the real Hux wouldn’t remember, either. Not that it mattered, really. Hux was the crazy one, now.

He didn’t realize that his act would stimulate Hux into pulling a trigger in real life, though. He didn’t have anything to do with that. 

Kylo feels sick looking at the woman’s marked face. It’s not so much that Lieutenant Demia is dead--although that’s sad--as that his plan didn’t go exactly as he thought it would. Some random person died, a human, one of his humans, not even a rebel. Everything he does turns out fucked up.

_ You didn’t do it. Hux did this to her.  _

Kylo begins to feel better as he stokes his own fury. He’s the Supreme Leader. He’s ready to hunt down and defeat everyone responsible for this murder. All right, it’s only Hux who did this, but still. He’s certainly ready to wreak a glorious vengeance for one of his loyal followers.

“What are your wishes, Supreme Leader?” They’ve cleaned up the bridge. Both Awooweel the assailant--he’d jumped Hux, too bad Kylo had missed that--and the general himself are under restraint. Kylo reads the situation before he really looks at it--the assailant is frightened, but angry about Demia, he had a crush on her, this is all very understandable and predictable--and then he turns to the thoughts of the person he’s really interested in. 

_ Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move, not a hair, not an eyelash, not a sound, no, perhaps he won’t notice--of course he’ll notice--don’t look this way-- _

Hux is hardly even registering him. He still looks mean, though--crazy glassy eyes staring straight ahead, a bit of drool working out of his livery lips. Presumably his fly is still undone under his tunic.

He leans close to Hux’s face, snarls. “Bastard.” 

Kylo expects Hux to lunge at him. Maybe that will earn a swift shot to the back from his guard. If not? Kylo is absolutely ready to strike down Hux where he stands. 

Instead, Hux bursts into tears.

It’s awful. Hux is trying to fight it, so he’s wheezing and trying to keep his parade face on while his eyes get red and his shoulders shake. Someone’s taken his stupid coat away and he looks ridiculously skinny without it. All Kylo can sense out of him is  _ permission to stand down, sir, permission to stand down _ . For a shocked second, Kylo thinks that Hux is trying to project this thought to him, but Hux seems absolutely lost in some other world.

_ Oh, for fuck’s sake.  _ The presence hadn’t told Kylo that his so-smart plan would work out this way, with everyone around him  _ embarrassed _ , of all things. They just want this to be over with now. For once, Kylo shares his soldiers’ mundane emotions. He has that broken-thing feeling again and he hasn’t even physically touched a damn thing. 

“Take the general to medbay.” They don’t have to be asked twice. Kylo doesn’t turn as is Hux is marched away.

He does cut off Awoo-whatever’s head, though.

As Kylo Ren metes out justice in front of his chastened troops, he’s thinking: Fuck that stupid presence. He won’t listen to it anymore, he keeps making the stupid mistake of  _ listening _ to people and look what happens every time. 

And anyway, what’s the good of being Supreme Leader if you can’t cut off a few heads? 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Kylo, when will you ever LEARN? He's so awful... truly the galaxy's greatest failson. As I'm sure he'd tell you himself, before he asked you out by saying you are even worse.


	4. Chapter 4

“Good morning, my sunshine!” 

Captain Phasma no-last-name has survived starvation, bombings, hand-to-hand combat, and planetary explosions. In the recent past, she’s had a close call with a garbage compactor and a fall down two floors of an exploding ship, which left her with multiple broken bones and some serious burns. She’s lived through  _ a lot. _ She’s not certain that she can live through another round of treatment from this doctor, though, as he prods at her and chit-chatters away about the glories of the day.

The treatment itself isn’t so bad. The ancient empire that the First Order grew out of had very advanced burn healing technology, it was something of a specialty of theirs, according to this wretched doctor.

“I even worked on the great Lord Vader myself,” he tells her. “You’re in good hands. And of course, you’ll be much prettier than him when we’re done, my dear.”

_ Senile old man, _ Phasma thinks. She doesn’t care about appealing to his tastes. In fact, the more threatening she looks, the better. 

Because as soon as she’s done with this treatment, Phasma is striking out on her own.

She’s been thinking about it for a while now. On the outside, she has everything--the command of her troops and the esteem of the First Order. If she died tomorrow, the General would make a very pretty speech about Captain Phasma and her sacrifice.

The only problem is, she’d have to sacrifice herself. And she’s come way too close to that lately to risk it happening again. It’s not just her, it’s the general atmosphere of things now. There have to be places in the galaxy that aren’t constantly being bombed. Nobody knows what she looks like, anyway, so why not just take off? Do some bounty hunting. Start a cantina. Moisture farm. The possibilities are endless… just as soon as she’s taken advantage of all the First Order has to offer. That doctor may run his mouth, but she can’t do what he does herself, and where she’s going to go there won’t be doctors at all, just her and a blaster and real ground beneath her feet. 

Until then, she recovers. The wing that’s she’s in has a well-stocked physical therapy room, but nothing can replace real-life movement, and Phasma’s never been one to stay still. She takes walks every day, familiarizing herself with every part of the medbay. There’s the wing she’s in, for the important patients, then the part where they take the stormtroopers that can be patched up--that’s been mostly cleared out now, but it must have been busy, after Supremacy--and the part where people go when they get sick with what the doctors call Crait virus, and the laboratories, and the door to what turns out to be the crematorium. It’s superstitious, but Phasma doesn’t like passing that big metal door. Instead, she usually what she thinks of as “The Quiet Route,” which passes near her own rooms and goes through a nondescript hall that for some reason nobody else seems to want to go near. Phasma thinks that it’s probably full of janitorial equipment or something equally dull, until the day she runs into the General.

Phasma has seen the footage of the Supreme Leader’s funeral. Everyone had to watch it, even in the medbay. She knows that Ren is leader now, and she doesn’t expect a get-well holocard from him, they were never that close. She had expected some sort of message from Hux, though. For a while, she had thought the message would be in the form of a scalpel across the throat or a poison injection. Maybe he’d found out about Starkiller? But no, they wouldn’t waste medical resources on her if they knew about that. They must still think she’s useful in some form. 

Anyway, she doesn’t know what’s happening outside of the official channels. Nothing gets down into medbay--the doctors are quiet, and the nurses are noisy but they get quiet around her, and even Kylo Ren’s been quiet, because there aren’t any lightsaber burn victims coming in.

She’s surviving, and Hux presumably is surviving, too. They’ll be surviving in different star systems soon enough, she tells herself. It’s probably best that nobody’s taken any interest in her. Still, it rankles that he’s forgotten all about the glorious Captain Phasma.

So when she sees a redhead walking down the Quiet Route between two little nurses with braided hair, she’s stunned.

“So you’ve finally come to see me, sir?”

The nurses turn their braided heads in unison and glare at her. Hux doesn’t, and for a second wonders if her brains got cooked in the fire and she has the wrong person. But the patient--and she realizes now that he’s a patient, he’s not wearing a uniform--really is Hux.

“You don’t know me, General? Come on. I don’t look that bad.” She points to her eyes. 

The little nurses get even more angry, tossing their elaborate braids and scowling. They remind her of ragneck lizards flipping their frills at her when she was a kid, and it would be hilarious if Hux hadn’t turned away from her when she had called him  _ General _ . 

Phasma has had the semi-luck of knowing both generations of Huxes, and if there was one thing that father and child had in common, it was that they both loved to be addressed by their ranks. The higher, the better for Armitage. The last time they had had a proper conversation, he had asked her how it would feel to serve under a Grand Marshall or a Moff.  _ You can stab a marshall and he’ll be just as dead as a captain _ , she had thought, but she had answered correctly and he had smiled and toasted her health.

The person who had drank to “the ever-loyal Captain Phasma” was  _ not _ the same person standing glassy-eyed between those two nurses.

_ Whatever’s happened to him, it’s worse than what happened to me. _

Phasma isn’t stupid. She knows to get away from a sick person. Rule number one, someone who’s weak is a liability. She lets the nurses bundle Hux away into one of those rooms, the ones she thought were janitor’s closets, and turns around to get out of that cursed hall. 

Just because she’s not looking doesn’t mean she can’t hear, though.

“Is that Ph--”

“Now, stay calm--”

“Captain Phasma--I order you to come back here right now--Captain--”

Phasma can hear those nurses droning away underneath Hux’s orders.  _ You don’t need to obey any of them. Just leave. _

“Captain,” and there’s some sort of scuffle, “Phasma--come back-- _ please _ \--”

Phasma feels her own speed, slamming the hall door behind her. It’s silent as space, now.

Later that day the doctor tells her that she’s going to ruin her skin grafts and her appearance if she isn’t more careful about strenuous physical activity. It’s all she can do not to ruin her arms by giving him a jab to the face. She’s not proud of herself, but sometimes you just have to run.

The _problem_ is that she’s not proud of it, though. Running is the smart thing to do. _Concentrate on yourself._ _Leave everything behind._ She’s done it before, and she can do it again.

But when she tries to sleep, she sees the scene in the hall again.  _ How can Hux exist out of uniform?  _ It’s like seeing a snail out of its shell, something out of its natural protection, mysteriously still alive.

_ He called for you, too.  _

She doesn’t want to think about  _ that _ at all. That’s even worse.

But... she’s stuck here. She tells herself that she’ll be able to concentrate better on her recovery by just seeing him one more time. Once she finds out what the hell happened, she’ll be off like a shot.

But how to do it?

In the end, it turns out that all she has to do to see Hux is ask. The braided nurses turn out to come from a culture with rather odd gender roles. In their system, men fight and women tend to the sick. Phasma is a woman, so it’s natural that she enter a man’s sickroom. This is the laziest thing Phasma has ever heard of--they must have a lot of extra time and resources to segregate that way--but it’s easier to just step through the door to Hux’s room than to figure out how to crawl through the ducts, so she lets these people’s ignorance work for her. Nurse Medawouriel gives her the visiting times and a lecture on what to expect in the mental reformation ward. Phasma doesn’t really understand the concept.

“So it’s reconditioning?”

“Oh, we don’t do that here. This ward is for  _ sick _ people.”

“Sick… It’s not catching, is it?”

The nurse has the nerve to tsk-tsk her. “You’ll be fine.”

It’s just one visit, Phasma tells herself. I just need to find out what happened. 

She announces herself with a “Captain Phasma, sir,” and stands in the doorway to investigate the terrain. It’s a little room, with a single bed, a bowel-pink chair, and a niche in the back that holds the toilet. No privacy here. 

Hux is occupying the chair, and he doesn’t rise from it to greet her. “Oh, it’s you.”

“I heard you--I mean, you recognized me the other day, sir.”

“Yes, I suppose I did. I’m having trouble remembering it, though.” Hux squints at her, then closes his eyes. “I’m tired, Phasma. What have you come to inform me ab--” His lips spasm, and it’s like something is stuck in his mouth. “Abuh, abuh,  _ about _ .” 

“Nothing, sir. I’m recuperating here and I saw you.”

“Not about a trial, then. No wuh,” and he manages to get the word out this time, “no  _ warrant. _ ”

“A trial? I haven’t heard anything about that, sir. I only meant to wish you well in your recovery.”

“My recovery.” Hux barks out a laugh. “I’m well already. Back on the bridge in no time.” He puts a hand over his eyes, as if the room is too bright. 

“What are you being tried for? What’s this about a warrant?”

“Nothing,” is the reply. “Listen, Phasma, if you’re here to kill me, get it over with.” His lips twist again.

“You’d be dead by now if I meant to kill you.”

He flinches at that. Careful, Phasma thinks. He might not be lying about getting back on the bridge. Don’t make him mad.

“I’m not here to kill you, sir. I only wanted to visit you. It’s a natural thing to do, visiting someone when they’re ill.” All right, she pulled that out of her ass--it’s not, not for her, and not for Hux, either. People are either salvageable or dead. She sounds like Rose of the fucking Empire.

But it works, somehow. “Well, sit down.” Hux pulls himself up from the chair and clambers into the bed. His feet are bare, which fascinates Phasma. She hadn’t really imagined him as having appendages like normal human beings. Brendol, obviously, but his son always seemed too good for that sort of thing.

Hux arranges himself carefully, although his hands are trembling. “And how is your recovery, Captain Phasma?”

And that’s how she spends the rest of her allotted visiting time explaining  _ herself. _ When she gets out of that room, she doesn’t know much more about what happened to Hux than when she went in.

_ He has some sort of brain sickness.  _ That was one thing.  _ But he also thinks he’s going to be arrested _ . What did he do to deserve that? 

She has to visit again to find out. “What’s the name of the illness?” she asks the nurse.

Medawouriel sticks her lip out when she’s thinking. It’s cute. “Nervous exhaustion due to midichlorian incapacity,” she states.

Phasma knows a  _ lot _ about how the human body works. Mostly so she can incapacitate it, but still. Midichlorian exhaustion is a load of fucking nonsense. There’s  _ something _ behind this, she can tell.

So Phasma tries to coax the story out of Hux. It’s not an easy task. Certain times of the day are better than others; sometimes he’s frighteningly restless, and sometimes he’s too sleepy to tell her anything. When he is able to talk coherently, he makes little requests of her. He wants her to bring him a data reader. The nurses don’t allow it. He wants a comb and a sanitation kit. That’s allowed. He wants sweets, so she orders crystal candies for herself and sneaks them into his room. “These are wretched,” he pronounces, and tells her that he hated them as a child, they were for  _ trash _ . “You know,” he says. It’s almost as if they’re equals now, as if he’s included her in his own unhappy childhood, which was such a pit of misery that it involved throwing away massive amounts of perfectly good food on a spoiled whim. Still, the next time, she brings in the fanciest thing she can think of, which is a box of chocolinos with some sort of fruity filling. These he enjoys, although he has a problem pulling off the wrappers, so she does it for him, then wipes his mouth when the filling drools out. Medawouriel catches her at it when it’s time to leave, and gives her a lecture when she comes in the next time.

“He threw them all up five minutes after you left. It’s not a good idea to give someone in his condition so much sugar.”

Phasma apologizes.

“Oh, no! You’re really nice… I mean, I’ve seen your picture, I know you’re a great warrior for our Order but I didn’t know that you were such a kind person underneath.” The nurse smiles. “Romantic, too… chocolinos. You don’t see that often in here!” 

Phasma had forgotten that chocolinos were supposed to be love gifts. It’s too bad she wasted them on Hux, really. If Medawouriel was just a little less pale, she’d be exactly Phasma’s type. 

Phasma has has other tricks up her sleeve.

“I don’t see girls like you too often in here, either.”

You can’t be too picky about your type, Phasma thinks, as they use up Medawouriel’s lunch break in what turns out to be an actual janitor’s closet. But when Phasma asks why Hux is here, Medawouriel  _ still _ gives the same standard answer. That girl is fun when she isn’t talking, but she is  _ never _ going to spout anything more than that medical gibberish. She may not even know what happened to Hux to make him the way he is now.

And that means that Phasma is going to have to go first.  _ She’s _ improving, after all.  _ Her _ doctor says she’s one of his best patients ever, and for all Phasma knows, he’s right. She must be looking good if she’s pulling these nurses. It’s going to be time to leave soon. Why does she even care, anyway?  _ Are you his servant? Are you attached to him, now?  _

Maybe that’s why she just asks, straight out, on what she promises herself will be her absolute last visit.

“Tell me why you’re here, Hux. What did you do?”

“It wasn’t a respectable thing. That’s all you need to know, Captain.” 

“I don’t care if it’s respectable or not.” Phasma tries her last gambit. “Medawouriel already told me, sir. I just want to hear it from your lips.”

Hux goggles at her. In some ways, he’s never been very clever. “You knew, then?”

“Of course I knew. I know everything!” Ha, what a line.

Hux turns his head, then curls away from her, wrapping himself in the blankets like he’s freezing cold. Phasma guesses she has him, then--if he wanted to bluff, he’d do it to her face, give her a dressing down about a subordinate’s place. 

She’s right. The story begins to come out, piece by piece. He had become overheated during an exercise--no, not overheated, excited--and had accidentally discharged his weapon. An officer had been standing in the way. 

That can’t be true. Nobody would be punished like this for accidentally discharging a weapon. “You know there’s more.”

Hux lapses into a confused way of speaking--she gets the feeling that he hasn’t quite put all the events together in his head himself. And the story he tells is really bizarre. It doesn’t quite square up with the person she knows--a sadist, sure, but also a terrible prig. He’d never do anything directly, or at least where anyone could see him do it. She’d swear to that, if he wasn’t telling her this crazy story himself.

And the worst part about is that she’s beginning to feel sad for him. Not as a person, really, but as something that isn’t useful anymore. During Phasma’s childhood, almost anything had been useful in the quest to survive another day, but there were a few things that were deemed too dirty to be touched. Three-eyed goats, white lizards with sticky scales. Babies born with no legs or deformed skulls. Those things had to be killed and burned, and their ashes thrown down the cliffs into the sea. 

Of course, the First Order is immensely more powerful than that old band of cliff dwellers, and its members don’t have to worry about lizard curses or demon eyes. But there are still things that go wrong, and frighten people, and have to be cast away. She’s talking to one of them now, although she’s still not sure what made him that way.

“It was the oddest feeling--like someone was touching me.” 

“Touching you?”

“Yes--it was like someone was in my mind--the most ridiculous thing--”

And  _ that’s _ it. Someone  _ was _ in his mind. It’s a good trick, sort of. She could see herself doing the same thing, if she wanted to get rid of someone and had Ren’s powers. Maybe not the exact same thing. Ren is more perverted than she would have been about compelling someone to do something against their will. Phasma would have just have had Hux shoot himself.

_ I figured it out before you did _ . 

She leans over him.

“Armitage.”

He uncurls himself so they’re face to face. Phasma stares at him. She’s scared that she’ll want to touch him, that he’ll be vulnerable in some way that will appeal to her. But he looks like the same old bastard she’s known for years, only with slightly watery eyes and longer hair. She’s perfectly capable of contempt toward him.  _ Good _ .

“I have to tell you something.” 

“What.” 

Phasma grins. “You’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever known.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've gotten here, thanks for indulging me with Phasma. There are so many questions about the character--she's supposed to be looking out for herself, so why does she stick around and keep on almost-dying? Why doesn't she just leave after the first time she almost-dies? I'd like to think that she'd eventually realize she has job skills and move on somewhere else. Be free, Phasma! Become the lady Boba Fett you were always meant to be!
> 
> The nurses and their braids are based off the Medawars in Carla Speed McNeil's comic Finder. If you like dark heroes with mysterious pasts, hanging out in crazy science fiction-inspired worlds... go read it. NOW. 
> 
> "Rose of the Empire" is stolen from [destinies' "Tactical Surrender."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13183992/chapters/30156201) In the fice, it's Rose Tico's favorite cheesy novel, but that doesn't mean that only she would have read it. Phasma is not a fan.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you like the last chapter? Well, how about from another point of view? Hmmm?
> 
> There's a mention of suicide in this chapter, and some stupid opinions about mental illness (these characters are all awful) so heads up if that's not your thing. Don't worry, everyone's as ok as they're going to be by the end of the chapter!

Armitage Hux wakes up in a dark room that smells odd. He has with hardly enough sense to comprehend anything outside his own body.

_ I’m too light. _

As anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with him knows, Hux adores his uniform. What’s less well-known about him is that prefers heavy fabrics in his civilian outfits as well. He has his robes and pajamas made personally for him, because he deserves that level of comfort. He’s never subject to chill and he always feels properly grounded.

Right now, though, he’s cold. The reassurance of structure is gone.  _ Something’s wrong _ .

Someone’s hand is on him, and his reflexes kick in. His arm flies up to catch the intruder, but there’s nothing there.

“Stop that,” a high voice hisses. Something buzzes into his shoulder.

The next time he wakes up, it’s intolerably bright. Hux calls for the lights to dim; no response.

Cheap day cycle lighting, obviously. _ I can’t believe this exists on my ship. It wouldn’t do in my quarters. _

More of the obvious: he’s not in his quarters.

The single bed that he’s lying in, a chair, a door (the kind that locks from the outside). No windows onto the stars, or even onto other rooms. From the disinfectant smell, there’s a chem commode somewhere in this room. 

It’s not a cell. Prisoners of the First Order don’t get luxuries like chairs and mattresses. And they most certainly don’t get cycle lighting, garish as it may be.

“Good morning.” The door slides open, and a human nurse comes into the room, carrying what looks to be a wave jab. Needle-free, the newest in medical technology. 

It’s poison, Hux thinks, and instead of the panic he should feel he experiences merely a stunted curiosity. This allows the nurse to sneak by his side and administer the jab.

“How are you feeling today?”

“Well enough.” The words slip out before he can bite them back.

“Good. This medication is meant to help you stay calm. We wouldn’t want to have to restrain you, hm?”

Restraints? He looks down at himself and sees that instead of his uniform, he’s in hospital pajamas. They’re papery and thin--that must be why he felt cold last night. 

_ Restraints. Medication.  _ This must be the little-used ward for mental degenerates. Mental reformation, officially. An Imperial holdover--the First Order has bred out most of that weakness and doesn’t tolerate it where it does exist.

However, the ward is sometimes used to house prisoners whose presence in the regular cells would prove a liability. High-ranking officers, for example.  _ Him. _

Hux recalls tears, somebody undoing the clasps on his collar and shirt. He’d allowed his uniform to be taken from him. Going further back… there was a dead soldier and Hux killed him. He doesn’t care to dredge up further memories. What he can piece together now provides a proper explanation.

The nurse turns out to be correct about the medication. It deadens his emotions and allows him to imagine his future with detachment. A trial for murder is the most likely outcome. It will be short. The punishment will probably be execution, or heavy reconditioning if he is thought to be physically useful. He will conduct himself with composure either way.

For the first two day-night cycles after arriving in the ward, Hux prepares himself for the inevitable knock on the door. The room does not contain a mirror, but he still diligently practices the expressions and phrases he wants to use at his trial. However, no one comes to visit, except for the nurses. When he speaks politely to the women who come in to dose and feed him, they ignore him. When he threatens them, they forcibly sedate him. They’re stronger than they look, and the sedative has some particularly nasty aftereffects. He doesn’t try speaking to them again.

After what must be the fourth or fifth day, he stops practicing his speech. It’s harder to speak--the medication must be building up inside him, making him slower, making him stumble over his words. Sometimes he has terrible cramps, for no physical reason he can fathom. It’s slightly like being choked with Ren’s nasty magic, except it doesn’t leave bruises. 

There are no duties here, nothing to apply one’s self to. No system, no order. It leaves him with nothing to do but think, and almost every thought is dangerous. Where is the ship headed? To Parassa, probably,  _ foolishly _ . But no one in his now very limited acquaintance will tell him, or probably even cares to know. What happened to him some days past? Some weeks past? Oh, he can’t think about that. 

He does have one lovely memory that he returns to quite often. It’s the day that he set off the dark energy beam on Starkiller. How lovely it had been to be bathed in that glorious red light. Someone had told him afterward that fifteen trillion of those scum had died. Hux is glad of that. _ If I die tomorrow _ , he tells himself,  _ I will be well remembered in the history of the galaxy _ .

Except he isn’t going to die tomorrow. No one seems to remember him in the here and now. Time slips by without any change in his situation. At some point he make the arduous effort to inspect the room for possible methods for self-elimination, more out of a feeling of duty than any driving desire. It would be difficult to make any sort of attempt, he concludes. Somebody has constructed this room quite cleverly. It hadn’t been him--he had always applied himself to interrogation and reconditioning design, not to trifling affairs like mental reformation. He knows so little about this area of the Finalizer that he’s not quite sure how he would get to the normal areas of the medbay from here. He could escape, if he put his mind to it, he supposes.

_ And where would you go if you did escape? _ He can’t answer that question. Hux suspects that without his induced state of detachment he would weep himself blind with grief. 

As it is, he’s merely numb. The world becomes that much smaller every day. There is only the prospect of the four walls of his room, and food, and sleep. Every so often the nurses let him out of his room to escort him to a little sonic shower located down the hall. There is no water and no privacy. Hux hates the feel of the waves on his skin, and they don’t eliminate smell as well as liquid does. He has a distinct sour odor nowadays, which is a constant irritant. He, who was always so neat and clean, no need to use a bottleful of cologne every day like that detestable Canady. He didn’t smell like dogs, either, like Peavey did, the wretch; when Hux had dressed Peavey down for bringing, of all things, his hunting hounds on ship,  _ someone _ had started a rumor that Hux was keeping an Endorian cutie cat in his rooms. Hux could swear that Peavey had gone so far as to make a miaow-miaow sound behind his back. The thought of Peavey’s idiocy rouses old, familiar feelings--frustration at the frivolity of others, contempt for inferiors, the desire for his rightful command.

Therefore, when he hears Phasma’s voice in the hall, it’s almost as if he had conjured her up. He needed a subordinate, and one came to hand. It’s no surprise that he attempts to order her into his presence. 

It is surprising, though, when she starts appearing of her own volition.

After establishing that she isn’t there to kill him, Hux accepts Phasma’s visits. They are pleasant interludes in an otherwise featureless existence. She seems to view him as a recovering, not a permanent, invalid, and she is always careful to conduct herself in accordance with her rank. Granted, Phasma is no lifeline to the outside world--she is completely ignorant of the goings on outside the medbay. However, she is willing to make conversation, about neutral things like her treatments and her doctor, and she is also willing to skirt a few rules in his favor. She brings him little things that he can make use of--a comb, a handkerchief, a set of medbay-issued slippers that turn out to be too shoddy to use. He is terribly hungry all the time, with a craving for sweets, and eventually he instructs Phasma into selecting an edible type.

Hux’s condition is particularly bad that day, and Phasma carefully unwraps each little treat for him. They have spent most of their adult lives together, but he has hardly ever seen her face, he reflects. He decides that she looks quite well for someone who has just been half burned to death. A few scars, but nothing inhuman.

“You’ll drop that,” Phasma warns, as Hux brings one of the candies to his mouth.

“No, I won’t.” The candy promptly slips between his fingers, into his lap. Phasma picks it up off the blankets and places it carefully back in his hand. 

_ That’s intrusion upon my person, _ he thinks, but he can’t manage to sustain the outrage that is his due. For this one moment, he will simply enjoy the sensation of eating something other than ration rehydrates. It feels good, too, when Phasma dabs at his mouth with a handkerchief, the cheap flavoring having spilled out his lips and down his chin. The little attentions she pays to him are pleasing.

So when Phasma asks him why he’s here, he’s not suspicious. She must be curious, after all, why her commander is here.

Still, that doesn’t mean he’s about to tell her. “It’s not respectable. That’s all you need to know.”

What Phasma says next shocks him.

_ She knows, but she still comes to see me. I still inspire my troops. I still inspire her.  _ Hux turns his face into his pillow to hide his expression. It’s not particularly appropriate to the gravitas of leadership.

_ I can tell her. _ What a relief to confess, even if he has to go slowly, to admit to things in his own mind before he can speak of them. It’s frightening to tell the parts he wants most not to remember, but she is so quiet about it, as if it is all perfectly safe. He’s reminded of being a child, learning to swim in the tactics lake, an immensity of chemmed-out gray. With every step he was desperately frightened of drowning, and after every timid step he would feel the sand beneath his feet and be reassured.  _ See? It isn’t so bad _ , he would tell himself.  _ You can go further, if you’d like to _ . 

He goes deeper and deeper into what happened until he’s at the parts that even he doesn’t understand. Weaknesses he didn’t think that he had, experiences that were foreign and frightening. Perhaps he’s just talking for the sake of talking, but just to speak out loud to a friendly listener is such a luxury now. Perhaps he doesn’t want this time to end.

“Armitage.”

_ My name, my name. I thought I’d never hear it again. _ Tears prick at his eyes, and he knows he should order her out, if he wants to have any hope of maintaining their proper relationship. It’s weakness, it’s almost fraternization--but he still turns toward the sound of his name.

Phasma leans over him, as if she wants to drink in his face, as he does hers.  _ Say my name again. I beg you. _ He feels as if they know each other now--she must understand him, what he needs at this moment, even if he can’t make himself say it. She must know that he still has pride, must admire him for it, even now.

Phasma opens her lips. Hux feels a flutter in his stomach.  _ This is what Ren must feel, when he uses his magic powers… _ He’s almost giddy with it.

Until Phasma actually speaks.

_ Well. So that’s her opinion of me. _

Phasma may think she’s clever, but she’s not quite clever enough to get out of reach of a smart backhand.

Hux can still have his little triumphs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> awwwww these two, neither of them are nice AT ALL.
> 
> I'm looking things up to write this and Hux has a cat? How did that happen? Nah, I'm rewriting this.
> 
> me: a laser sword, I'm cool with this, they're flying, whatever  
> also me: dude is wearing black clothes and he has a cat? and the hair isn't all over the clothes? how the fuck did that happen? I don't believe THIS
> 
> It's obviously some sort of crazy rumor. Kylo seems like a pet guy, though, he probably forgot to feed a fish or a bird and it died and that was the beginning of his turn. I'm not even kidding, that would be traumatic enough without literal possession by evil.


	6. Chapter 6

_ I really should have known not to trust Phasma _ , Hux tells himself, nursing his stinging hand. He had gotten so caught up in the nice part of that silly little memory about the water that he had forgotten how that process had ended. His father had wearied of waiting for his son to get over his fears and given him a good push into the water, past where the sand dropped off. Some cadets had been practicing nearby, and one of them had managed to pass him a life ring; otherwise, the storied career of Armitage Hux might have ended at age eight or nine.

Phasma is just as smug as his father, even with a future bruise ripening on her cheek. “Go ahead, hit me. I’m still right. And you know it.” She’s lounging in the chair now,  _ smiling _ at him. Of all the insolence.

“Right about what? I’d like to see the bigger idiot you’ve known. Who put you in the position you’re in today, hm? Who fed you, clothed you? Who taught you everything you knew?” Oh, grand. Now he sounds as petulant as the old man himself. Just remembering that voice makes Hux’s bile rise.

“I’m sorry.” Phasma almost sounds sincere, although Hux notices that she’s dropped the “sir.” “I didn’t mean--I meant, I was surprised that you hadn’t figured things out, that’s all. You’re smart.”

“That’s fake, even for you, Phasma.” His hand has stopped tingling. “What haven’t I figured out?”

“Ren did this to you. Didn’t you realize that?”

“I… what? No.”

Phasma explains her theory. Up to that moment on the bridge, Hux must have been acting normally. She’d known him for ages, he was always so controlled. Never broke a stride. Not one to let emotions overcome him. Really, the model of soldierly calm under pressure. 

Hux nods. He can appreciate that description of himself.

She goes on. Ren could interrogate people using only his mind, right? Hux had told her about it himself. 

“I think I’d know if I was under interrogation.”

“Not interrogation, exactly. He played with your emotions, or put thoughts inside your head. Just to fuck with your mind. Put you off balance.”

“I was explicitly trained on how to shield myself from that sort of intrusion. You wouldn’t have been privy to that training, of course, but you can trust me when I say it was intense and thorough.” However, Hux considers, much of the effect of that “training” could have been linked to the presence of Snoke. No Snoke, no shield. Not that he’s going to admit this to Phasma.

“Even so, if you were tired--and you weren’t expecting that sort of thing--I mean, you said it felt good. I wouldn’t expect that from Ren.”

“I wouldn’t, either.” Still, he can recall shreds of that lurid fantasy, if he tries. He could think back to it to determine if there was anything odd about it, anything outside of his usual range of thought. It’s safe to do so in front of Phasma--he’s properly repelled by such a fantasy, now, and even if somehow he wasn’t, the effects of the medication must eliminate any chance of arousal.

He’s right. He can examine everything dispassionately, remember his own thoughts-- _ had  _ they been his own thoughts?--without falling apart. Hux comes to the end of of that gaudy vision, where he’s looking down on a struggling Ren. He had been concentrating on the reactions of his own body at the time. So he hadn’t seen what was right in front of him, as he lifted the blaster to Ren’s forehead.

But now his memory supplies the truth. Ren was grinning. And he actually  _ winked _ .

_ Fuck.  _

It  _ had _ been Ren, and he had even been brash enough to taunt Hux in Hux’s own mind. 

“Disgusting little shit. I’ll break his neck.”

“Told you so.” 

Now that she has his attention, Phasma elaborates on her theory. That feeling he had? That was Ren, manipulating him. Phasma has an even sketchier concept of the Force than Hux does; according to her, the man is some sort of wind witch and felt him up using a breeze. Hux doesn’t bother to counter Phasma’s primitive concept, as the basic premise is solid enough: Ren can manipulate objects without touching them, why not a person? Ren just hadn’t done such a thing before. Or more precisely, Hux doesn’t  _ know _ of any previous instances of this sort of behavior.  _ Perverse.  _

“But why?”

“To be mean. To get you upset. Or maybe he has a crush on you.” Phasma shrugs. “I don’t read minds myself.”

Hux doesn’t share Phasma’s uncertainty. It had been purely malevolent intent on Ren’s part. Of course Ren would want to humiliate him, make him look unworthy of command. Hux had simply defended himself from the wrong angle, thinking that Ren would slice off his head or crumple his neck. He could hardly blame himself, though--Ren was lazy and easily upset on his best days, hardly the sort of person you’d imagine capable of a scheme of any sort. Either Ren had hidden his true strategic talents for years  _ or _ there was another influence involved. It was probably Ren’s scavenger. The two were supposedly enemies, but these mystics have no morals, no loyalties. Had  _ she  _ somehow seen what had happened? The thought nauseates him--that little piece of scum, getting off on perverting the process of honest discipline, no doubt. A chaos sower. 

Phasma interrupts with musings of her own. “If I had those skills, I definitely wouldn’t have left you alive.” She sighs, as if she wants to be one of  _ them _ too. “You’re lucky, really.”

_ How dare she tell me what luck I’ve had. _ “Lucky! Lucky, to be trapped in a little room like this. I could have had the galaxy at my feet, you know. And now--”

For the first time ever, Armitage Hux catches himself in the middle of a speech. _ And now what? Another day in this room, another week, a lifetime.  _

There is an alternative to this endless false imprisonment. Someone is here who  _ should _ obey his orders. His mouth fills with spit and a bitter taste. He swallows, very carefully, and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. He has to give this order, no matter how awful it makes him feel, no matter whether his body betrays him in the process (as it has so often lately) in its determination to keep itself functioning to some sort of natural end.

He narrows his eyes at Phasma, who seems--and he manages to register it with a tiny bit of pleasure, even through the bodily stress--suitably cowed.

“Phasma”--he points his finger, no matter that it’s shaking--”I order you to--”

He can’t help but distract himself from the order he’s about to give, though, even with the most unsettling thoughts.  _ That filthy girl. She touched me, too. _

  
_ That  _ sends him over the edge. He manages to turn away from Phasma in time to vomit down his shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhhh no this story is turning gen dammit
> 
> don't worry, there's like one more chapter and then there will be all sorts of gore and hatefulness


	7. Chapter 7

_ I’m just too nice a person, _ Phasma thinks, as she comforts her--superior? Friend? No, more like  _ obstacle _ .  _ Being in the the First Order has made me soft.  _

She keeps saying the wrong thing to Armitage. Now he’d gotten himself worked up and started to order her around, but whatever the order had been--and she thinks she knows what he was trying to say--it had worried him too much to get it out. It was a bout of stress vomiting, she’d seen it often enough in training. Medawouriel had darted in with a fresh top and some sanitation wipes, but Phasma was able to send her away before she applied a jab. She had been a little angry that the nurse didn’t come in when Hux slapped her, but presumably even Medawouriel can tell that her patient isn’t much of a physical threat. 

Anyway, Phasma wants Armitage awake to hear what she has to say to him. Even if that means rubbing his back to calm him down. He’s so unhappy right now that she can touch him without objection. Well, if he wants deferential, he has it from her. She can do nice things, too.

It’s not something she advertises about herself, but Phasma has experience taking care of children. She does train cadets, after all. And before that, she had had a few sisters and brothers, one of which made it all the way to manhood, and her tribe had had a kid, too. None of them are around now, but that’s life.

In a way, she’s thinking of Armitage as a kid now, too. Not hers--she’s much too young for that--but as the kid of that spoiled, bloated fuck, Brendol Hux.

Phasma had met the father well before she met the son, after Brendol had managed to crash his star ship on her planet. She had been a leader of her people, and he had been a leader, too. As such, they had spent a lot of time in each other’s company, with no one else allowed to be around. They made plans to get him back into space, and once they were done planning they would hole up in a people mover and she would try to get him to talk about where he came from, the miracles he had seen, the exotic places he had been. 

But Hux mostly wanted to complain about the people he knew--his fellow officers, his lazy troops, his ex-wife, the wicked people who had sold him an interest in junk property in a place called Javera. All these individuals were wonderful mysteries to a girl who had never seen more than a hundred people in her life, but Phasma quickly figured out that the man only spoke about them in the context of how they had disappointed him, Brendol Hux

“And those damn scammers blew 500,000 of my credits. Then, I had to see Armitizh--”

“What’s an Armitizh?”

“Ha, good question! That’s my son.” 

Why was Brendol rolling his eyes? Having a child that belonged to you alone and not your tribe was really something special, especially for a man. “You have your own son? Congratulations.”

Instead of nodding and accepting his praise, Brendol burst out laughing. “My son’s nothing like you. I always wanted a strong boy, like me”--he looked Phasma up and down--”or a daughter. I don’t discriminate by sex, some of the great Imperial soldiers were women.  _ Human _ women, I don’t hold with Twileks, droopy-headed sluts--”

Phasma had been desperate both to keep him by her side in the near future and shut him up in the present.

“If you don’t like your son,” she offered, “I’m bleeding.”

“You’re what? Don’t you have a bandage?”

“No.” Phasma looked him straight in his puffy face. “I’m fertile. I can have your child, if you want another.”

“What? Of all the things to offer.” Brendol shrunk away from her, leaning his bulk on the vehicle door. “Barbaric planet.”

Phasma felt the heat rise in her face.  _ Calm down, he doesn’t know how much he insulted you,  _ she told herself. At least she’d stunned him into silence. 

Instead of tearing out Brendol’s throat, Phasma had curled up, placed her face against the people mover’s window, and gone to sleep. They hadn’t spoken of it again for the rest of Brendol’s life.

Looking back on it, it had worked out for the best. She had exaggerated her certainty of giving him a child--if he  _ had  _ wanted one, she might have failed him. Even if a woman bled, it didn’t mean she was capable of carrying a child to term, or that the child would be viable once it was born. And being pregnant made you slow and tired--not exactly what the First Order wanted out of her.

Besides, she had thought when Brendol Hux said that his son was  _ weak _ , he meant that his son had twisted legs or couldn’t breathe right or talk straight. A liability as defined on Phasma’s planet. But Hux’s son was just skinny and pale. Really pale, true, but Hux still had a perfectly functional adult child, at least from first appearances. 

In her first few weeks off planet, Phasma had used some of her precious spare time to observe Armitage Hux. Partly because he was the offspring of the chief, partly to see if Brendol was right, if his son had some sort of fatal weakness that didn’t show at first glance. From what she could tell, he was less talkative than his father, and constantly had his face in front of one computer or another. She was about to conclude that there was nothing wrong with him and leave him alone when he caught her out.

“Why are you following me around?” He did have a sharp face--not like Brendol, who had a face more like a jellyfish. His mother must have had a face like a stone axe. “Do you have some sort of orders from my father?”

Wonderful. The son had the same opinion of the father as the father had of the son, and he associated  _ her  _ with  _ him.  _ Maybe using Order language would get her out of this situation. “Not at all, sir. I was just curious about the simulation you’re running. I hope I haven’t overstepped my boundaries.”

“The simulation?”

“I’ve been assigned to teach some of the cadets grappling skills and hand-to-hand combat. But I’m not sure if I’m precise enough. If I had some sort of simulation to help adjust my training, perhaps it would help. Sir.”

“This is a massive troop movement generator.” He said it as if Phasma had half a brain. “But I do have something smaller. It’s simple enough for you to understand, I worked on it as a young cadet myself--here we are.” His fingers flew over the screen and the figures reduced to just a few, swirling around each other in different combinations. “I’ll put it on your data pad, and you can apply it to your teaching.”

Phasma studied the simulation every day, and finally understood it, and when she put it into use her students actually improved. Not  _ that _ much, but it had been noticeable. 

When she had told him that the simulation had worked, she had been rewarded with a stretch of the lips. That was how he smiled, she guessed. “You’ve been working off the plans my father gave you, no doubt. Outdated methods. Come back again and I’ll provide you with more simulations.”

That had been the start of their working relationship. She still obeyed Brendol first, but the longer she worked with the son, the more her opinion of the father worsened. Of course, her relationship with Brendol had started out on a nastier note, but it wasn’t just that violent beginning that made her think poorly of Brendol Hux.

When Phasma joined the First Order, she found out that humans on different worlds had children  _ all the time.  _ They were fertile enough to have children that they didn’t even want, that they would hand over to complete strangers. Whole planets were teeming with extra offspring. These children also grew up to be fertile, to the point where during training they had to be injected with drugs to keep them from having  _ more _ kids.

Therefore, Brendol Hux’s hatred of his son was a reflection of his major flaw--he was  _ lazy.  _ There was so much human life in the galaxy--fat, skinny, light, dark, tall, short--and so much of it was hanging on by a spider’s thread, ready to fall into the hands of whoever offered a little food or water or money. As Phasma saw it, Hux had had every opportunity to have more children. Since he hadn’t even tried, he had no right to wail about the problems of the son he did have. 

Not that Armitage didn’t have flaws. He was overconfident, haughty, obsessive. And he was poor company in the same way his father was. When he spoke about something personal, which was rare, it was about someone who was stupid or incompetent or blocking his way. 

But at least if he had a problem, he  _ did _ work to solve it. 

Which was why when Armitage had ordered her to eliminate his father, she had been perfectly happy to do so. Hardly anyone would care, and Brendol had brought  _ that _ state of affairs all on himself.

And that action had led her to exactly where she is now. Sitting in a windowless room, comforting the son, who has managed to tumble himself out of power and is now in some sort of demented mourning for his own self. 

It could be worse, at least for her. She’s not dead. And she did save herself years of Brendol’s bitching and moaning. 

Anyway, she’s not giving Armitage what he wants now. She just doesn’t want to have to kill the dad  _ and  _ the kid. That’s too much, even for the dreaded Phasma.

Besides, she’s been coming up with a plan. For once,  _ she _ can solve a problem for  _ him. _

What she’s thought up might work, it might not. She knows she can do her part--it’s easy enough to fuck with the First Order’s computers. If Armitage can’t pull it off his part himself--well, she won’t be around to find out. But she does think it’s only right to give him a chance.

“I think I understood why you were trying to tell me before,” Phasma says. 

Armitage glances toward her. 

She runs her finger across her throat, and he nods.

“I don’t have a weapon on me right now.” She creeps her hand up his back, right to where his hair--no one’s cut it, how odd--straggles down his nape. “I could break your neck. But it’s not like it is in holos. It takes a long time to die. In fact, since we’re in the medbay, you’d probably just be paralyzed for a while. Or, if no one finds you in time, you might choke to death. It’s really a toss-up.”

He jerks away. “No, no, not that.”

“I do have another option for you.”

“Are you going to smother me?” 

“No.” She resists the urge to call him an idiot again. Instead, she crouches down to whisper in his ear. “Don’t you want revenge?”

“Of course I do! I just--”

Phasma doesn’t have time for his excuses. She pours out the rest of the plan. What she’s able to do for him, and what he’ll have to do on his own.

When she finishes, Armitage wrinkles his nose. “That’s  _ demeaning _ .” 

She should have known that he would be prissy about it. “So what? You can do whatever you feel like doing. Or not. The important thing for it to work is proximity.” 

“I don’t think--I don’t want to be thought of in that way. Not by a  _ monster _ .”

“Too late for that, you already are.”

“Well, whatever you think about it, the feeling is entirely not mutual. Anything I do, I do under protest.”

Hux’s face has gone blood red. Is he being truthful about that? Or protesting too much? No more curiosity for her. She’s almost discharged all of her duties here. 

“So, do you agree to it?"

The blush somehow deepens. “I agree.”

“Good. I’ll get started on my part.” She takes her hand off Hux’s back and touches her face. He’s given her enough of a goodbye gift, she thinks.

“I’ll see you later.”

“ ‘Ma, wait--”

But Phasma’s already out the door, looking for a dark-haired girl with a particular set of braids in her hair. She has an entirely other set of plans she needs to work on now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so i just want to write about Phasma and her Mad Max planet, is that so wrong? forgive me
> 
> Brendol Hux is the wooooooorst. Bossy, whiny, into having kids kill each other for kicks (WHAT.) So I had to give him a few more bad attributes here. He's not sexist, though! According to him!


	8. Chapter 8

Hux turns the little bundle that Phasma gave him between his hands and reads the note again.

_heres my gift. i got him started on you, also got the cameras cut. good luk you know wat to do_

She can’t _spell_ worth a damn, Hux thinks. _Barely literate._ The autocorrect on data pads masks a lot of flaws.

Hux vaguely remembers receiving the package. It must have happened a few nights ago; his sense of time is absolutely shot. It _had_ been the middle of the night, at least. Phasma had appeared at the door, tall and blonde, with a little pale face peeping behind her.

“What are you--”

“Shh.” Phasma covered his mouth with her hand; he acquiesced. He felt something slide underneath his pillow, then she was gone and he fell back into sleep. When the lights came back on, he fished out the package. It contained the note and two knives; primitive little things, but sharp as hell. They would pack a good punch. Phasma must have been carrying them around for years.

Phasma has not come back to visit again. Hux suspects that she is gone completely--she wouldn’t risk herself for him in this manner had she meant to stay on base. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. Either way, their time together would have ended soon.  

To his surprise, he still trusts Phasma’s judgement. Enough that he hasn’t considered using the knives on anybody else than their intended victim. He stows them carefully away, one inside his pajama sleeve, one between his legs. Odd positions, but practical for what he plans to do to Kylo Ren.

Phasma had explained the plan to him--she had the necessary links to the outside world to alert Ren to the General’s presence. She would make it seem as if he was pining away for Ren, thinking only of him, dying of unrequited love. This is the sort of thing that would spark Ren’s curiosity--he would want to see the results of the use his mystic powers, after all. Ren would be lured down, all unknowing, to the predator’s lair, where Hux could set upon him at will.

“How would I do that?” had asked.

“Simple,” Phasma replied. “Get him in your arms. Physical proximity.”

Hux concedes that there are several weak points in this plan. First, whatever Phasma does, it will have to be convincing enough to bring Ren close to him again. Hux has never thought of Phasma as a natural seducer, and even if she were, Ren simply might be uninterested. This possibility disturbs Hux more than it should.

Even were Ren to come to him, Hux will have to school his thoughts carefully, so as not to give away his intent, and then overpower a physically stronger enemy. His hands are steadier--he either is developing a tolerance to the medication or Phasma has fixed it so the dosage is lower. Still, he will need luck to deliver a fatal blow to Ren, even if he manages to get the man into an optimal position, so to speak.

He can only half admit it, but he’s frightened of rejection: that he’ll simper in front of Ren and that Ren will rush off in disgust, or worse, laugh. It’s not that he often thinks of himself as an unattractive man--it’s more that he doesn’t know how to measure himself without the trappings of power about him. He suspects that, out of uniform, he may not be appealing--may, in fact, be repulsive.

He hadn’t told Phasma about it--she had had absolutely no need to know--but he’s been involved in this sort of entrapment plot before.

Not as the bait, of course. Not exactly.

There had been an extremely popular young colonel, handsome, well-bred, a reckless sort. Rumored to be extremely promiscuous. The older officers forgave him every foolish thing he did, and the younger officers--the ones who counted, the future of the Order, _Hux’s_ Order--adored him.

There had been a small operation on Kashik 2, far from the First Order’s usual base of operations, far from First Order leadership--at least leadership in the form of Brendol Hux. It had been a success, especially for Colonel Oziak, who had managed to annihilate a group of hairy insurgents despite a rather nasty malfunction in his armored transport. Oziak and his troopers had disregarded this setback and tracked down the insurgents on foot. A testament to the man’s personal strength and courage! Even an electric fire wouldn’t hold the man back.

(Or more precisely, a short in the wiring on the left side of the transport, near where Oziak was supposed to have been sitting. The man apparently didn’t believe in standard safety protocols, and had been walking about when he shouldn’t have been.)

Colonel Oziak had strode back onto the ship in glory, trailing his little captains and lieutenants behind him. There had been a celebration afterwards, in the officer’s mess. Hux had attended, out of duty. He had overseen the technical side of the operation, after all, and it would be suspicious if he stayed away.

When he had arrived, the crowd was still fawning over Oziak, laughing and clapping him on the back, pouring him shot after shot, no doubt. It would explain what happened next.

“Ah, Major Brendol! Congratulations,” Oziak said, as he returned Hux’s salute. Hux reached out to shake Oziak’s hand, even as he fumed over the misnaming--the man wasn’t dead, after all, and manners demanded.

“Actually, my given name is Ah--”

Oziak grabbed Hux’s shoulders and pressed their mouths together.

Hux couldn’t remember the feeling of it at all. He had struggled a bit, but overall Hux thought that he had taken the intrusion calmly. He _had_ felt a bit of a thrill. Not at the physical contact, but that Oziak would make such a public blunder, that the man was finally exposing his animal nature in front of everybody who counted.

What he did remember, very well, was what he _heard_. Laughter, whistling. A feminine voice squealing “Kiss me like that!”

It wasn’t disgusting to them. It was _funny_.

Oziak had chucked him under the chin, and whirled away to another group of admirers, leaving Hux stranded by the door. One of the very old officers, all pointed nose and sideburns, had given him a “Oh, cheer up, boy!” before he, too, was inevitably pulled into into Oziak’s orbit.

Hux had miscalculated. Oziak had these people bewitched. They had no respect for leadership, for effort. A few drinks later, when the music had started playing, he had come to darker conclusions; perhaps the laughter had been aimed at him. There was something about his person that invited it, that would always attract humiliation. That anyone would feel attraction to him, that was the joke.

He had sat in that sodden, self-pitying state for longer than he realized; when Oziak approached him, the lights were dimming and the music had gone off.

Oziak took the place on the lounge next to Hux, spreading out his legs to claim his natural space.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

If hate and--yes, envy--alone, could kill, Oziak would have shattered into a million pieces, right there. Hux stared into the depths of Oziak’s glass. If only he had brought his rakalia drops from his kit, Oziak could be keeling over right now. Obvious, but what Oziak deserved.

Oziak was, of course, still very much alive and talking. “To be honest… a lot of you officer types look the same to me. My family was mostly planetside, you’re all so pale. I love it, really, I think it’s really attractive…”

“Amazing.” The numbing effect of the alcohol was beginning to fade away, with a headache rising up to take its place.

“Yes, really.” Oziak leaned over, as if they were co-conspirators and not rivals. “Have you ever had a Oomok?”

“A _what_.”

“Oh, I mean I haven’t.” Covering his tracks, there. “Beautiful creatures, though. You can see the veins right through their skin. You have a similar color. I mean, not the same exactly, you’re human, but you know. You’re close.”

Oziak approached even closer. Hux could feel the warm spit in his breath.

“Would you like to come to bed with me?”

Was he _serious_? Knowing Oziak, he meant the offer as a sort of consolation prize. He’d let some of his stardust rub off on his inferiors, particularly Brendol Hux’s odd son.

“No, actually, I’d like to kill you,” Hux replied.

Oziak grinned and rose from the lounge. “All right, you’re still upset. Think about it later, though!”

Despite the madness of the offer, Hux had left the party in a considerably lightened mood. Oziak wasn’t some golden god. He was a moron, silly enough to reveal his tastes to an almost-complete stranger. A stranger who meant, and could very well do, him harm.

And it had all worked out to Hux’s advantage in the end--the next time Oziak took shore leave, he was caught in the arms of one of these Oomoks.

(Rare creatures, these Oomoks turned out to be, and with some characteristics considerably more exotic than translucent skin. It had been an effort to find one of them and bring it into servitude, and a surprising hassle to arrange a sting on the brothel at the exact right moment. But it had been _so_ worth it.)

Anyway, promiscuity was one thing, but known interspecies contact was right out. Oziak had been court-martialed and thrown out of the Order in disgrace. Hux had looked him up a year or so ago. It appeared that he had fallen into small-time arms dealing near Canto Bight. Gotten fat, too. A satisfying ending for the man.

Hux, meanwhile, had moved into a position in life where he had easily forgotten the humiliation of that one night. Everyone had looked up to him, not just as a leader, but as an exemplar of his type. Hard-working, clever, slim and trim and perfect. No one would dare make a mistake like Oziak’s now.

Well, not now. _Then_.

Hux feels a pulse of anger at Phasma for leaving, for putting him in such a state of vulnerability.

_No, no. Trust her. Practice your lines, your thoughts. He’ll come. Think of how it will feel when you sink that knife into his wretched neck._

He had dreamt of Phasma last night. Not of her specifically, but of the sensation of her hand on his back. The voice had been different. _You’re not alone. I won’t leave you. Cry as much as you like, my darling, I’m here._

 _Sentimental rubbish. She’d never really say that._ Hux bites his finger til the blood seeps out. An old technique to concentrate the attention, but a good one.

No matter the situation, no matter the objective, Hux will _always_ be able to apply himself to a task. A little assassin, his father had called him. It had been meant as a compliment. This should be easy for him, really. Ren is a gigantic ego, a depressive Oziak, nothing more than that. Easy prey for anyone who plays on his vanity. After all, he was attracted to that gutter girl. Whatever Hux is now, he’s certainly more appealing than _that._

 _And what if you become attracted to_ him?

Hux shoves _that_ question to the very back of his thoughts. Instead, he thinks back to that wink that Ren had given him. Well, Ren had made that fantasy, now he’ll just have to live-- _and die_ \--with it coming true.

Hux sniggers at his own play on words. His enjoyment is interrupted by the door swishing open, a flustered nurse announcing something--a visitor! Important!--and a familiar voice.

“Is something funny?”

Hux’s mind goes completely blank.

_Oh. No, not at all._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course there's going to be Wookiees in this sucker. They even have a colony! Hux thinks of it as "Kashik" because he doesn't respect the Wookiee tradition of multiple y's. fuck him, all respect to Chewbacca and his family


	9. Chapter 9

Kylo Ren is tormented. As usual.

He’s banished one presence from his life, only to be practically tortured by another. It’s Luke, of course, it’s always Luke. He’s dead. You can only show up to other people like that when you’re dead. 

It had been scary the first time it happened. But Luke keeps doing it. It’s starting to get boring. Banal. He won’t shut up.

Every time he says the same thing.

_ I will not be the last Jedi. The war is just beginning. _

Wonderful. Just what the universe needs, more war. More generals, more battles, more bullshit. 

As for Rey? The space that was dedicated to her is now filled with regret. Not all for himself. He almost feels worse for Rey, like the Force has trapped her somehow. They’ve missed their moment to be great together and it will ruin them both.

What would have happened to Rey if she had never come into her powers? Eventually she would have grown old in the desert, died, returned to the sand. It wouldn’t have been so bad for her. She would marry a junker or a trader, go ruin exploring in her spare time, maybe become an acolyte of the Church of the Force. Kylo doesn’t know what the Church of the Force does exactly, but he guesses it’s nice things, like handing out water and feeding orphans. Rey would have been a good person, doing small, good things.

And what would happen if he found Rey now? 

Even if somehow they were together, they’d just spawn another round of an endless cycle of demons and heroes, bred to make constant war on one another. A bigger weapon, a human that much further past human, destruction and resurrection over and over again until the entire galaxy is blotted out and remade, atom by atom. Kylo envisions it, a death machine so large that planets and stars are suspended  _ inside _ its perimeter, the natural void of space blocked out by gray, laser-studded walls. 

He also has visions of Rey crying over a baby.  _ Their _ baby. It looks like a human, but Kylo knows it’s not. Its powers--as just an infant!--mean that this being is already past their powers of comprehension. It will never smile at them or laugh or cry. It’s the perfect avatar of light or darkness, and it will break their hearts, and never even care. _We’re just vessels of the Force_ , Kylo thinks. _I hate it._

Everything around him seems like a caricature of darkness. The stupid white-clad stormtroopers, the prim little officers, the black droids--who the fuck decided to make an dark droid? Sometimes he has trouble thinking of them as real. They’re all weak in the face of his powers, too, which doesn’t help.

When he destroys them, the presences all go away. 

Maybe this is a sign he’s bringing balance to the Force. 

Maybe, if he balances things out, he’ll be safe with Rey. What he sees in the future won’t come to pass.

Or maybe not. Either way, he feels better when he does it. So he keeps doing it.

Human things still happen to him. Like the demented messages he’s been receiving from Room MRW-425. They started just when things got really bad, and come at regular intervals, every day cycle.

_ I can’t forget you. You don’t know what you did to me. I want your touch so badly... _

_ Please, please, make me feel the way you once did. I stay up nights thinking of you. _

Who the hell has time for this? Somewhere on the increasingly empty  _ Finalizer _ , someone is devoted enough to their own lust to write him jackoff letters. It’s sweet, in a way, a testimony to the human spirit. Well, human horniness, at least.

_ If you’d come to me… I adore you. Your “Demia” _

What the fuck? Who was Demia? There are so many people that Kylo has disposed of, but Demia’s name sounds familiar. 

When he looks up the room number, it’s a tiny room tucked away in a corner of the medbay.  _ He  _ didn’t kill Demia, It’s Hux. That’s what happened to him.

Kylo hasn’t completely forgotten his old co-commander. There had been chatter over the “Bridge Incident” at first. Rumors spread. Hux had had a nervous breakdown. Hux had tried to rape one of his lieutenants right there on the bridge. Hux had killed himself by drinking a bottle of cleaning fluid. 

Kylo hadn’t asked where Hux had gone. He had had other things to do than engage in idle gossip. Besides, the other First Order commanders had turned out to have problems of their own as well. Peavey, Mireno, Kratz… it’s difficult to remember them all, just like it’s hard to read the words on a electroslate once you’ve erased it too many times. They had all turned out to be disappointments in their own ways, although it was easier and easier to replace them every time, even with a rapidly dwindling officer pool. No more pretending that he wasn’t involved in driving his generals mad. Certainly not after he had attempted to throw Kratz off the bridge by his hair. 

The fucker had been wearing a toupee the whole time.  _ How didn’t you notice that, you idiot?   _

Anyway, Hux seems like a remnant from a simpler time. Kylo wonders if he’s sick, mentally or physically, or if the First Order had just dumped him in the room and “forgotten” to get him back. It seems like an Order-ish thing to do. Maybe the room is some sort of dank prison, with red walls and a torture throne.

It’s a disappointment to find that Room MRW-425 is in some nondescript hall and that the interior looks like it’s been stolen from a cheap clinic in the Republic. 

And the room’s occupant? It’s the same person that he’s quarreled with for ages. Hux doesn’t look physically sick or dramatically mad. He’s even managed to find pomade somewhere in the medbay and slicked down his hair. 

It’s reassuring, really. So, so many people have disappeared from Kylo Ren’s life lately. Here’s one who’s still the same, on the outside at least.

What is he supposed to say, though? Hello seems like a weird choice.

He doesn’t have to bother going first. Hux begins rearranging himself on the bed, throwing his head back, letting his mouth hang a little open. It’s bizarre, like watching a human try to imitate the mating dance of an inhumanoid species. Is this an act on Hux’s part? Or is he actually this awkward a flirt? 

“So, you’ve been sending me messages? About your love for me?”

Hux nods, a curt movement that’s totally at odds with his past writhing.

“I’m--I’m obsessed with you.” 

That rings true enough. Who wouldn’t be?

“I want you.” Hux very slowly lays a pale hand to his heart.

Kylo almost giggles. Why had he ever been scared of Hux? He’s still wound so tight, it’s funny. Whatever they do down here in medbay, it hasn’t altered his personality much.

“What about me?”

“What?” 

“What about me do you want?”

“Come closer and I’ll tell you.” 

Aha, he’s trying to lure me into something. Sex? Violence? Both? Whatever, it’s not a concern--in the last few cycles, Kylo has overcome odds he thought were impossible. Done things that his various masters had told him he couldn’t do. 

This is a diversion. Whatever Hux is planning now, he can handle it. 

Kylo sits on the side of Hux’s bed. “Well, tell me what you like best about me.” 

The flirtation stops for a second, as if Hux is a cheap droid that needs time to compute its answer. 

“Can’t open your mouth?”

“After you did--well, after you were in here.” Hux taps at his temple with two fingers. “Well, I keep going over and over in it in my mind. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It’s haunting me.” 

“It is?” Kylo shrugs. “I’m not bonded to you or anything. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Bonded?” Hux gives him a sharp look. 

“I’m not still in your head. That’s what I mean. Your thoughts have been your own.”

“Oh, really. It doesn’t feel that way.” Hux pushes himself off the pillows to sit next to Kylo, although he’s careful not to let anything touch. “It was the most erotic experience of my life. I--well, I think about what it would be like. If you touched me. For real.”

It’s surprising to see Hux blush. Kylo had assumed he was bloodless, like the white worms of Yavok, but that’s not true. He’s not acting, either--he’s not pretending to be some demure little thing. It genuinely embarasses him to admit this.  

Kylo feels sorry for something. Maybe it’s Hux, more likely it’s himself. It doesn’t really matter. He catches hand in his, presses his fingers against Hux’s pulse. 

“You’re scared.”

“No, I’m not,” Hux replies automatically, like a little kid being teased.

“It’s ok. It’s normal to feel butterflies, but be a little nervous about acting on them.” Kylo smiles. He’s stealing that line straight from an educational talk on young love from Luke Skywalker, Jedi master. He hasn’t thought about those times in so long, but he’s in such a ludicrous situation  _ now _ \--sitting in a clinic room in an abandoned ship with a pining Hux--that he can’t feel pain at any memories of  _ then _ . 

“But I want you now,” Hux wails, and Kylo feels those thin arms land around his shoulders and Hux’s lips on his, kind of--Hux has astonishingly poor aim. It’s clumsy and very human. That makes it feel good, even though Hux is licking part of his cheek. 

_ Admit it to yourself, that’s why you came down here. You don’t get a lot of chances for human contact now. _

Kylo disengages to guide Hux into a better position.

“Is something wrong?” can sense Hux’s fears clearly now, most of which have to do with the state of his body-- _ my breath stinks, I smell, I’m greasy _ .

It’s all too much for Kylo. “You’re just clumsy, that’s all.”

_ That _ was the wrong thing to say. Hux freezes, although he’s forcing himself to keep his arms around Kylo, as if it’s the most important thing in the world to never let him go. 

It’s fear of being hit, being choked. Kylo’s going to punish him now. He doesn’t want it, but perhaps he does, perhaps that’s why he’s done this, he’ll be humiliated and all his desires fall through--

It must be exhausting to be Hux. “I’m not going to hit you.”

Hux’s breathing slows, and his hands stop trembling against Kylo’s back.  

This must have been why it was so easy to get at Hux in the first place, Kylo realizes--he has trouble conceiving of a situation in which one human being could touch another without the intent to punish or degrade. He loves doing it to others, after all, so presumably everybody else feels the same way. Kylo had managed to create Hux’s perfect fantasy--caresses without hands, kisses without lips, all the pleasures of touch without the threat of the person behind it. Sensuality in a vacuum.

The First Order is incontrovertibly fucked up, Kylo thinks. He’s glad he’s done what he’s done to them.

Kylo tries to suggest some of the happiness and security he feels just being close to another human being, any human being.  _ You’re close to me now, in my arms. It’s nice, you enjoy it.  _ He runs his hand up under shirt, counting his ribs--of course he can feel them, and the nubs of Hux’s spine. He’s so thin, and a bit soft where he isn’t bony--not the kind of muscle Kylo wants, that he knows that he’d find under Rey’s desert-chapped skin. 

He reminds himself that Hux isn’t like Rey in other ways. He’s perfectly Force-dull. Fucking around with him isn’t going to doom the known universe.

Kylo remembers the last time he saw Hux, tears streaming down his face, utterly humiliated. He begins to feel pity again, the broken feeling. The other officers Kylo has gone through had various hobbies other than the Order--children, wives, husbands, pets, scams--but Hux had never been anything but somebody’s general. He enjoyed it, too, never wanted to be anything else, really. Snoke had been right. He’s like a pet dog, waiting, lonely for a new master. Kylo can be kind to him. Literally throw him a bone, although ugh, it’s gross to think of it that way.

Hux pulls away for a second, cheeks flushed, eyes closed. Kylo looks at Hux’s tight, haughty little face. Some people had thought that his parents were handsome, but Kylo had always thought they were the most common-looking people in the universe. Kylo doesn’t find Hux attractive, really, but he has a certain fantastic look that sets him apart. When Kylo was younger, he had wanted flaming orange hair so everyone would know how powerful he was. Came from kiddie holos, but there you go.

“How special you are,” Kylo whispers. “You have the most beautiful eyes. The most beautiful hair, the most beautiful lips.”

It’s all bland stuff, but Hux reacts to it. Kylo can sense a surge of distrust, competing with a rather desperate hunger for more of this shameful talk. He likes it, but he knows he shouldn’t. 

Physically, he reacts, too, pushing Kylo down onto the bed and frantically pressing his face into Kylo’s.

“You don’t have anything to say about me in return?”

Hux blinks in confusion.

“You’re the Supreme Leader.” Kylo watches as Hux primly tucks a strand of hair back into place. “You lead hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of ships, the most powerful fleet in the universe. What can I say to you?”

He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, Kylo realizes. He’s really been stuck down here with nobody talking to him. Just like Kylo thinks of Hux sniffling on the bridge, Hux thinks of Kylo swinging randomly at machinery. A man with a few nasty mystical tricks up his sleeve, but still a man.

That’s nice. It’s nice to have someone who still thinks they can play with him.

“And yet I’m taking time to be here with you. Just because you asked for me.” Kylo grazes the tips of his fingers over Hux’s ass. “Isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t you say you have the power over me, General?”

Hux breaks open at these words, there’s no other way to describe it. His normal restraint snaps, without shame, and Kylo is swamped with Hux’s sheer pride. It’s almost as if Kylo isn’t there, but as if Hux is staring into a talking mirror, one that shows him as the powerful general, with all his weakness and desires smothered under his greatcoat. 

Kylo is aware that Hux is hard, half because he can feel Hux’s cock against his leg and half because Hux is so aware of it himself.  _ Look, it’s working again, the damn thing... I’m so close, so close… Ah, I can’t let myself, my purpose… My knife... _

Hux’s thoughts are  _ very  _ loud. It’s almost like being smothered in one of his speeches, only about Hux’s cock. Which he apparently refers to as his knife. Kylo would laugh, but he’s suddenly aware that he’s overextended himself in the past few days. His grip on reality is fading, fast.

The room itself disappears. Instead, Kylo finds himself lost in visions, drawn along a series of tableaus from Hux’s life--Hux calmly sipping from a mug, Hux signing an order, Hux watching as a gang of men surrounding a man in a gold cape, a scream as the man crumples under a wound, desperately scrambling toward an escape pod. I’m trapped in Hux’s thoughts, Kylo thinks. It’s not scary, he tells himself, it’s just like the silly little holorides that mom used to take me on. The Haunted Hall of Armitage Hux.

But the vision goes on after the ride should have ended. Hux turns around as his men approach him. They haven’t lowered their blasters. But why? Why haven’t they? Hux curls his hands to his chest as he realizes what’s about to happen. Kylo sees him open his mouth, but he doesn’t hear what Hux says, just the pew-pews of the shots.  

Fuck. He comes back to the mundane world, with something grinding against his aching body. So that’s what’s seeing into the far future feels like--like shit. He feels like he’s about to throw up blood. He feels like he’s been sat on by a planet. He almost feels sorry for Luke fucking Skywalker.

He drifts back into the vision, trying to catch details before it inevitably fades.  _ Those men, the ones around Hux, they aren’t here anymore, they’re gone now. That can’t be.  _

_ That wasn’t the future.  _

He’s touched something dead, something that was going to happen, perhaps should have happened, but won’t now. If he hadn’t been scared enough to fuck with Hux, get rid of him in the way he did, neither one of them would be here now. He would be something different. Maybe he’d be with Rey. Or maybe he’d be what his dad used to call star meat. The vision didn’t tell him and now he’ll never know and always regret.

One thing’s certain, though: Hux would be dead.

“Hux,” Kylo rasps. “Did I ever tell you that I saved your life?”

The grinding stops for just a second.

An intense pain blossoms in the side of Kylo’s neck. It blocks out all the other pain, physical and mental, and for a tick of time Kylo is grateful for it before he realizes what’s happened. 

_ Oh, he’s tricked me, that’s cute, how do I keep the blood in my body, oh fuck, mom, mom, help me-- _

The world goes dark.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEADS UP: The beginning of this chapter gets close to "dead dove." Don't worry! Everyone's as ok as they're going to get, but you can stop at Chapter 9 if you want.

_ What a triumph. _

Hux gazes down upon the remains of his second-greatest achievement. It doesn’t matter what happens next, he’ll go to the grave with this lovely image in his mind: the body of the Supreme Leader sprawled under him, the gash laying bare the workings of Ren’s throat, the bed soaked in blood.

Ren is dead. He’s done it.  _ My clever boy. _

Hux toys with one of Ren’s giant hands, allows himself a regret at the limpness of the fingers. It had been enjoyable, just as he had worried, and Ren had distracted him a bit at the end--he’d saved his life? When, exactly? A lesser man would have asked exactly what Ren was babbling on about. But he had stuck to his higher purpose in this endeavor and succeeded.

That doesn’t mean that he isn’t still erect as hell.

Hux experiments with tiny movements against Ren‘s thigh. It still feels good, despite the change in Ren’s condition.  _ Someone will come in and catch you being so vile _ , he thinks, but he’s too giddy to deny himself. He catches Ren’s leg between his own, rubs himself against it. It’s back to the schoolboy method, but it doesn’t feel any worse for that, especially when he has the unexpected luxury of a still-warm, unthreatening body underneath him,  _ especially _ when he thinks about the mark he’ll leave behind on Ren.

_ I win, I win, I win. _

Just as he reaches the moment of accomplishment, a pair of hands clamp down on his back.

Ren’s blinking at him.

“You didn’t think I’d actually let you kill me, did you?” 

It’s not the kind of question one can answer. Especially when one’s still panting and wet.

Ren laughs softly. “The look on your face. You sicko.” The gash on his throat sprays little jets of blood. 

Hux falls onto the bed as Ren rolls out from under him, watches as Ren sprawls out in the chair. He closes his eyes and waits for Ren to strike him down. It can’t be long, the only question is how much it will hurt. It’s almost like it isn’t about to happen, like he’s just awaiting a beating from his father. This situation has happened too often to him for him to be properly scared, that’s the problem, his father never properly followed through, this whole business could have been avoided.

Nothing happens. Hux opens his eyes, in spite of his own better judgement, and looks at his tormentor. Ren seems oddly calm, staring off into the far distance as if there’s something beyond Hux and the walls of this room. Hux notes his pale face, with its puckered, scabby scar-- _ has he been picking at it?-- _ and the dark circles under his eyes. He would look sick, even if he didn’t have blood seeping from his wound. His  _ closing  _ wound. _ I never had a chance.  _ Of course Ren can heal himself. Hux remembers Snoke’s gashed face and curses himself for a fool. 

“You’re less powerful than me, you know.” It’s like Ren’s just figured this out. 

“Obviously.”

“You did really well, though. I was scared for a while. I figured it out, but I was scared.” He rubs at the scar on his neck. “It was clever.”

Then, with the same dull affect: “Would you like to be my general?”

“Don’t play with me.” Hux sits up straight on the edge of the bed, points his chin upwards and arcs his neck towards Ren. He hopes, desperately, that understands this body language, the offer that he’s making. Can’t the man read minds? If he can’t entice Ren to kill him cleanly, it’s a cruel death he’s coming up against, the kind of slow death he’d find entrancing if he heard about it happening to somebody else but which he naturally dreads experiencing himself. 

“I’m not playing with you.” Kylo actually smiles. Perhaps he’s lost enough blood to derange himself. Well, further derange himself. “I want you to work with me. In the next step that I’m taking for our Order.”

“Are you quite alright?” _ I just tried to kill you. I stained your uniform leg. _ Somehow, the two things seem equally horrible. “I--I’ve been hostile to you in the past.”

“I don’t care what you’ve done here. I just want someone with experience with the Resistance. These others don’t work, I was working with Mireno--”

“Mireno?” Hux spits out the name--he knows her, an Imperial holdover with a slack mind. How in the universe did her flabby buttocks come near command? “Well, if you expect anything great out of her, you’re--”

Ren interrupts. “I knew you’d be like that.” He leaves the room, and Hux bites back the desire to scream  _ Wait a minute, I reconsider, come back!  _ until Ren actually does come back, with a poorly wrapped package.

“Open this.”

Hux holds his breath as he picks at the wrapping. It’s a firebomb, or a shard spitter, or a contraption holding a poison dart.

It’s his uniform. Hux presses it to his face before he can consider whether there’s poison in it. It smells lovely, like the laundry detergent the Order has used since he was a boy. Perhaps it’s the same uniform he was wearing on the day; Hux surreptitiously examines the crotch. It’s perfectly stainless, and a quick sniff rewards him with nothing more than the scent of artificial lavi flowers.

“I bought your boots, too,” Ren says. “I don’t know if the pants work without them.” 

He has a genuine concern for Hux’s sartorial affairs.  _ He’s mad. I might as well go along with him.  _ Hux wants to slip himself back within the confines of that uniform like a starving man wants food or a drowning man wants air. There could be a lethal dose in every seam of the cloth and it would be worth the moment.

“I--I need to wash first.” He won’t sully his uniform again. 

“There’s probably a shower in the nurses’ office. Let’s go there.”

  
It’s all a little much. From victory to defeat to victory again, all in what? Minutes? Things aren’t supposed to happen that quickly.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes, yes,” Hux says, and crosses the threshold.

The nurses’ station is deserted, except for a heavyset woman who lowers her eyes when she sees the Supreme Leader. It’s so small, Hux marvels--a little, stale smelling room with a round, plastarine desk and a few chairs. There’s even a plastarine vase of fake flowers, sitting on top of the plastarine desk. Are these the people who were holding him back? It seems so silly now. The whole thing seems so very silly.

Ren takes his hand. It startles him. “There’s a water shower through that door.”

The temperature controls are not ideal, but it’s real water and real soap. The steam surrounds him like a blanket, and Hux lets himself fantasize: the bed in his chambers, the smooth feeling of the sheets against his skin, the lights that he can adjust however he pleases, the purr of the air filter. Nice, clean things. He washes his hair twice--it’s too long for regulations, he’ll have it cut--prods at a few ingrown hairs on his face--oh, he’ll have a proper shave, no more of the repressor--and scrubs his armpits and groin with particular relish. He had worried about that, that Ren would want to have at that part of him, and that it would smell bad and Ren would be repulsed. If could see where I am now, how shocked she’d be at how her plan turned out.

_ If Phasma was here, she’d tell you to watch your back.  _ That thought, along with a sudden halt in the hot water, curb his euphoria rather sharply. Ren is no friend of his, this may well all be some sort of trick to corner him again. But why would he need that? Why wouldn’t he have just eliminated Hux before?

The door opens. “I forgot to get you a towel.” 

Hux dries off, and wraps the towel around his waist. He’ll have to dress in the office, in front of the matron. 

The woman is gone, Hux knows not where. Despite everything that’s happened, he’s slightly relieved at this relative privacy. Relative privacy--Ren is stretched out on the bank of waiting room chairs.  _ He missed me. He finds me attractive, he wants me. _ It’s truly a shameless thought, but Hux pauses before putting on his undergarments, looks over his shoulder to see if Ren is watching him.

Ren is staring at the ceiling, with the same dull, far off look as before. 

_ Fine, fine. _ It’s best to dress quickly anyway, get out of this hell.

“I’m ready to go, Supreme Leader.”

Ren pushes himself up. “You forgot your hair. I brought your stuff for you.”

“Is it that important?” It’s mortifying to have forgotten it, really, but Hux wonders if perhaps it would be best to come across as slightly humble.

“I want you looking like my perfect general.”

“Oh.” Put that way, it’s charming. Hux uses the reflection of the plastarine to part and slick down his hair.

“You look just like your old self.” Ren nods. “Time to go.”

Back in the halls of the Finalizer, Hux feels like a fish thrown back into water. However, his joy is slightly tempered by a distinct lack of personnel. He had wondered about his reception, but there are surprisingly few people to receive him. 

“Where is everybody?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Of course it’s my concern, I need information on the status of our forces--”

Ren looks down at him, with the first sign of real annoyance since they met again.

“I said you could be a general again. I didn’t say what you could have command of.”   


Hux’s sense of unease grows as they approach the bridge. There’s nothing left, no one working at the rows of desks, not even a data droid. Something has gone terribly wrong while he’s been away.

“Am I the only one here, then?” It’s freezing cold--the Finalizer was meant to be warmed by the human bodies of the officers and the mechanical heat of droids. Hux regrets that his hair is still wet under the pomade. Ren hadn’t  given him back his hat.

Finally, some other humans appear, lounging near the bow windows. Hux recognizes them as officers--his officers, but changed, loose and casual where once he had them pin-straight in their demeanors. They’re wild haired, with torn uniforms and, to Hux’s horror, bare feet. They’ve all smeared something brown on their faces--it must be blood, where would they have found dirt? They look at him with a sort of half-recognition, not joy, not scorn. Hux wonders if they’re drugged, and his heart hurts; he had wanted their obedience so very badly.

“These are my knights.” Ren sweeps his arm, a grandiose gesture for what must be less than twenty people.

“Nonsense. The knights of Ren are made-up nonsense. That’s Unamo. And that’s Lieutenant Mitaka.” Mitaka, he realizes, is missing an arm. 

He also isn’t responding to his name.

“What in hell have you done to my army, Ren? I’ll have you court-martialed for this, I swear to--”

“Taka Ren.”

Mitaka’s hand is suddenly around Hux’s wrist. He wouldn’t be a problem on his own, but the other so-called knights are surrounding him now. They’re  _ his _ officers, he knows each one of them and calls them by name, but Ren has turned them feral somehow. They’ll attack me, they’ll have my head, Hux thinks, and he starts to feel shaky on his feet. It’s been thirty years since he’s been in this sort of situation, and he can’t handle it now.

“Can’t get them to slap each other around anymore, can you?” It must be meant as a taunt, but Ren says it like he’s a neutral observer. “Come on. Stand down.”

The so-called knights of Ren pull back into their previous positions, slouching over consoles or lounging against the walls. Hux looks on in wonder as Unamo curls up on the floor.

The consoles are all dead dark. Normally--before--the bridge would be a hive of activity, with men and women constantly overseeing the functions of this ship and its sisters. Now it’s silent, except for Ren’s pacing footsteps.

“There isn’t a soul left on this ship outside here and the medbay, is there?”

Ren shrugs.

“Are there even any other ships left?”

“Maybe in the Outer Rim. Maybe not. Not near here, though.”

“Why do you want me here?” Hux hears his voice echo, shrill in all the emptiness. “You’ve left me with nothing!”

“We’re at Parassa.” 

“Oh, Parassa. Grand. Wonderful. The Resistance is here, then, and you want to fight them with this.”

“No. I wouldn’t have done this if I wanted to fight.” Ren looks at him as if  _ he  _ should be the one comprehending this madness, as if this all makes perfect sense. “I thought it would be nice if you would surrender.”

“Surrender!”

“There are about as many of us as there are of them. We’re in balance now. Anyway, you’re the face of order. They’ll recognize you.” He smiles. Hux hates that smile. “It’ll be kind of funny.”

“It’s not a laughing matter! The army is gone, the ships are gone, according to you, at least, and you’re planning to surrender! You’ve destroyed everything. All the time, effort, and money, millions of lives--”

 

“You have no authority to speak to me about ending lives. None at all.” 

For a moment, Ren’s demeanor completely changes. He’s furious, but more than that, Hux recognizes command. He puts his hand up to his throat out of habit, but he feels nothing except the own acid in his throat, and just like that, Ren is the nonchalant creature of the sickroom. Sad, tired, lost in his own crazed logic. 

Hux suddenly recalls a memory from his childhood, very early on, before he had left Arkanis. He had had a strict education, but in his scarce free time he would curl up in a window seat and look down on the little native children that would gather close to the wall of the Academy grounds. They would play games that involved little chants, and he would memorize them, both to sharpen his observation skills and because he rather hoped one day he could play himself.

_ When I was walking by the bog last night _

_ I saw the crane king flying through a fight _

_ The men were fish _

_ The troops were logs _

_ And the gen-e-ral was a big black frog _

_ Blub, blub went the fish _

_ Crack, crack went the logs _

_ And croak, croak, croak went gen-e-ral frog. _

Hux hums it the tune to himself. His father had given him a hiding for singing it out loud; it turned out that the crane was a symbol of the nobility of Arkanis, and the other animals represented the pompous, inept Imperial soldiers. Afterwards, he had been ashamed of his own stupidity and of his desire to play with those worthless children--he should have known better. 

He’d never thought about it again til today, but it makes sense. This is why Ren took him back. Not out of love, not out of admiration, but to make him play the silly General Frog to his traitorous relations. 

Armitage moves toward the darkness of the wall, slumps down against it, lets his head rest against his knees. Years of work, years of struggle, everything destroyed because he had been weak enough to be manipulated by this madman. Humiliation after humiliation, and he’s roused himself again and again for what? To come to this end, a little figure for Ren to play with.

There’s a worse possibility. Perhaps he hasn’t been manipulated, at least not by Kylo himself. Perhaps Kylo is right, and there’s such a thing as fate and destiny, and this is his. All his thoughts, his actions, bent towards nothing. Plenty of seemingly important people must have thought themselves the rightful rulers of the galaxy, and plenty of them must have disappeared without a trace, their goals unfulfilled, their names forgotten. 

_ After all, it happened on Hosnia. Why shouldn’t it happen to you? _

Thinking of dissolution, Armitage is made aware of all the sensations of his body: the sweat prickling under his armpits, the throb above his eyes, the churn in his guts. He desperately needs to move his bowels, to piss, and oh, how he hates that his body is the only thing keeping him here, that he’s not a creature of pure will. Why wasn’t he born as Kylo Ren? How limitless he’d be then, and at the same time he wishes that Rae Sloane was here, to put her arms around him and tell him he’d done right, there was nothing else he could have done.

“It’s time for you to talk,” Hux hears Ren’s voice, and at the same time he realizes that the knees of his uniform are wet. He’s been crying, damn Ren for seeing him in a state of self-pity like this. He scrambles upwards, arranges himself in parade rest. 

“I can’t. It’s gone away from me.” Hux attempts to rasp the words out. He’s not lying about his lack of abilities. General Frog is an apt choice: If he tries to speak, nothing will come out but a croak. Let Ren punish him, there’s nothing to be done now.

Ren looks straight at him. There’s nothing in those dark eyes, nothing but madness, but he’ll hold Ren’s gaze until Ren strikes him down.

“I understand,” Ren says, and Hux feels a hand on his face, and the world changes.

He can feel his lips move, but what he’s saying isn’t important, it’s where he is, the beautiful scene at on the ice planet, the release of the weapon. Only it’s different, better. Now the beam grows to encompass the scene; the troops crumble, the mountains crumble, and Hux knows that as long as he keeps talking the light will reach him too, a release from human pain, from doubt, into one endless moment that will send him forever through the galaxy. 

_ I’m the Starkiller now.  _

_ No one can touch me. _

Someone is answering him, someone familiar and appalled, but that doesn’t matter because the light is so close now. Hux arcs his hand out into it and watches it disappear. 

Let me be one with you, Hux whispers, and he hears it like it’s his true voice and the light engulfs him and he’s blacking out the universe and there’s no words--

* * *

Kylo Ren watches as Hux crumples to the floor. He deliberately shields himself from knowing whether the man is alive or dead. Either way, he doubts they’re going see much of each other again. If he’s alive, the Resistance can take care of him. If he’s dead, he’s not exactly strong in the force. Kylo feels sorry for Hux--the man has, or had, to be cruel and cut off, even when it was in his own worst interest--but he’s tired of dealing with people who can’t restrain their sadistic impulses. 

Some people have more patience. Like his mother, when he cried out for her help, and he heard her voice, guiding the blood in his body, calming him enough to attain the concentration he needed to heal himself. Or perhaps she did some of healing herself. 

He’ll ask her when he sees her.

“What the hell was that about?” Poe Dameron’s voice crackles over the comms. Ren recognizes it from when the two were kids together, and Dameron was always trying to boss people around. A case of Force envy, probably. He hasn’t changed much. “You’re surrendering? General Hux is coming in peace? What?”

“He meant every word he said.” Because every word he said had been Kylo’s. Hux had performed beautifully, though--arrogant and bombastic while speaking words of peace. After Kylo woke up to Hux squirming on top of him, he decided to keep the man alive just for this performance. He knows Hux and Dameron have a history, and he was curious to see how Dameron would react to the general spitting back in his face. But Hux had been too ill to see to it.

It worked out in the end. There was no way that Hux would have known about what happened with  _ Poe’s _ mother.

“We arrive at your dawn. Hold fire and we hold ours.”

There’s sputtering on the end of the line, and some consultation. Kylo isn’t surprised when he hears another voice, offering agreement.

It will be done, and soon. Dawn will break on the Resistance encampment, so they can see his shuttle and the Finalizer hanging in the sky. He needs to prepare.

As his Knights follow him off the bridge, Kylo catches something, a thought, or an echo of a thought:

_ where am i, where am i, don’t leave me here, i’m not meant to be here, i don't feel ANYTHING, help _

Kylo ignores it. 

Two women are waiting for him on Parassa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ooof, I'm done... thank you for reading! this was My First Fanfiction, and I started it while I was laid up sick, not sleeping well (hence the time to write), and having some pretty vivid dreams about the psychological horrors of space. Which meant it started out grim, and just went on from there. Poor characters, it's not your fault I was on painkillers. 
> 
> I do wonder what kind of reception Kylo will get from his mother...

**Author's Note:**

> Of course there's going to be Wookiees in this sucker. They even have a colony! Hux thinks of it as "Kashik" because he doesn't respect the Wookiee tradition of multiple y's. fuck him, all respect to Chewbacca and his family


End file.
